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Patient Care Doesn't End At The Hospital Doors

by Mary Cook, Director of Contact Center Solutions, Varolii Corporation - March 26, 2013

PATIENT CARE DOESN'T END AT THE HOSPITAL DOORS

By Mary Cook

For more than a decade, companies in virtually every industry have made the “customer experience” a strategic priority for their business. For the healthcare industry, customer experience means delivering a positive patient experience, both inside the hospital and once a patient has been discharged. Individuals require personalized care plans and treatment information—and this extends to how organizations communicate with patients outside the hospital walls.

At the same time, growing numbers of patients and members of healthcare organizations are demanding convenient and real-time access to trusted and reliable health information through a range of online and wireless channels, including e-mail, web portals, text messaging, social media outlets and mobile devices.

Clearly, patient expectations and demands continue to evolve across all demographic groups. Which means providers must, now more than ever, engage with their patients to meet those expectations and demands. This is shifting the focus to patient engagement – a critical task to ensuring the health and wellness of consumers.

PATIENT ENGAGEMENT CHALLENGES FACING HEALTHCARE ORGANIZATIONS AND PROVIDERS

Poor Patient Communication

Healthcare organizations today are faced with major hurdles when it comes to improving communication between providers and their patients. Industry research indicates that healthcare organizations spend a significant portion of their operational budget and resources trying to connect with patients to remind them of upcoming appointments, prescription refills, etc. However, despite these efforts, hospitals regularly experience an appointment no-show rate of 15 to 20 percent, with each appointment’s value at more than $230. This results in millions of dollars of lost revenue each year per hospital – and hospitals can only hope to recoup a small portion of this for each missed appointment.

Not only are patients missing out on critical procedures and exams by missing appointments, they are also left feeling unprepared and less involved in their own healthcare from the lack of information.

Gone are the days of patients and members relying solely on physicians to call them or send mail with healthcare information and advice. To overcome their poor health literacy, patient demands are dictating new levels of communication about their health. The challenge for healthcare organizations is how best to satisfy this demand and effectively communicate such information to their members and patients. With patients asking for access to healthcare information online and from anywhere at any time, healthcare organizations and providers need to find a way to engage with patients wherever they may be.

Low Patient Adherence and Compliance

Prescription non-adherence costs the healthcare system an estimated $290 billion annually, and much of this is directly linked to people either not taking the medications prescribed to them correctly, or not taking them at all. With more than 50 percent of the U.S. population taking at least one prescription medication and 3.5 billion prescriptions written by doctors each year, the impact of medication non-adherence is significant.

At the same time, patients are also not adhering to wellness programs, medical advice or instructions. The ability of healthcare providers to facilitate patients’ adherence to, and compliance with, medical directives and advice is inextricably linked to their ability to manage the costs of reaching out to their patients. The reality is that outreach becomes less cost-effective when organizations rely solely on their live support staff to provide the outreach.

The costs of not reaching out to patients are found in lower adherence and compliance rates. The result is more emergency room visits, more unscheduled admissions, and excess consumption of interventional treatments. These issues can lead to poorer clinical outcomes that can compromise a patient’s health and increase the risks of low patient satisfaction and higher incidence of lawsuits.

Scalability

As their patient population increases, many healthcare organizations experience great difficulty with scaling their patient engagement efforts. This is particularly the case when such engagement is managed primarily by live care support specialists. Organizations are increasingly aware that employing live support staff to communicate with large numbers of members is simply cost-prohibitive and an inefficient use of operational resources.

What organizations and providers must do is find cost-effective methods to reach out to and motivate their members to be more engaged in determining the health outcomes. That could mean universally adopting social media like Facebook or Twitter to communicate with patients. Another method could involve implementing an automated, integrated technology solution that provides a more scalable way to connect with large patient populations.

IMPROVING PATIENT ENGAGEMENT

Creating meaningful patient experiences and facilitating patient engagement is about more than just achieving patient satisfaction with a service. It is about empowering patients to become more knowledgeable and make informed choices about their health. Healthcare providers play an important supportive role in making that happen.

If patients are going to take responsibility for their healthcare, providers have to furnish them with meaningful and trusted education and information. Patient education and information must be relevant to patients’ ability to make informed choices and decisions. It must also be delivered to patients, wherever they may be -- in the hospital, at home, at work, or in the car.

Regardless of which technologies the organizations and providers employ, the healthcare information must be delivered in a manner that is easily accessible, understandable, timely and responsive to patients’ particular needs. For example, communications should incorporate technology solutions that are familiar to patients (such as text messages, email and phone calls) and easy to use (such as an online portal to view health records and increase access to information). Simplifying the patient communication process in this manner will increase the likelihood of patients taking greater control over their own healthcare decision-making.

In an inpatient environment, hospitals can adequately prepare patients for discharge procedures, which can prevent patient readmission and inpatient injuries. Thus, hospitals can establish patient loyalty while improving the overall efficiency and quality of inpatient care. Such efforts can provide meaningful value to patients by motivating them to take ownership over their own care before they go home.

On an outpatient basis, healthcare providers need to continue their connection with patients. To do that, they need a way to communicate via multiple channels that deliver trusted patient information tailored for each patient’s needs and preferences.

In today’s competitive and mobile landscape, healthcare organizations and providers are constantly tested to enhance the patient experience by engaging patients to take a proactive role in their health and healthcare. A healthcare organization’s success will depend on their ability to implement patient engagement strategies that gain and retain a patient’s confidence when it comes to making informed healthcare decisions at every touch point of the patient experience. If done right, organizations and providers will also be in a position to attract new patients and vastly improve patient healthcare outcomes.

Mary Cook is the Director of Contact Center Solutions for Varolii Corporation, a market leader in customer interaction management. Prior to Varolii, she was a principal at The Call Center Intelligence Agency, providing expertise and interim management services for worldwide contact center operations for multiple industries. You can reach her at mary.cook@varolii.com or by phone at 407-967-0581.

 
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