Patient empowerment is the new patient engagement. Providing your patients with the right tools to be engaged in their own care not only boosts their health and wellness but also improves the productivity of your practice.
Today’s patients expect a better experience not just in terms of personalized care but also in terms of efficiency. In this digital age, it isn’t surprising that patients want their physicians to have immediate access to their reports. Also, they shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to see their own medical reports on their personal devices.
Practices that facilitate patient empowerment are witnessing better patient satisfaction, improved staff productivity, and increased referrals.
The following four tools should, therefore, be a part of your patient engagement strategy in this decade:
Platform for sharing Medical Imaging Reports with Patients
A secure, online platform that allows imaging providers to electronically share DICOM imaging records and associated radiology reports directly with patients. This is a great opportunity to engage your patients with an online solution that will provide a better level of understanding of their current health situation leading to a higher level of patient satisfaction. This saves your practice the cost and time related to purchasing and burning CDs for reports.
Once patients receive access to their records, they can also securely share these records with a physician/healthcare facility in its original diagnostic quality. These recipients can then view the records in an FDA-certified zero-footprint viewer or import the associated DICOM files into their local PACS environment. Radiologist reports can be viewed in their original templated format, can be downloaded as a PDF or can be printed directly from the patient’s account.
Real-time HIPAA and HITECH compliant secure texting platform
Having a secure texting solution within your RIS/PACS completely transforms how radiologists interact with referring physicians and patients. Users can instantly share images, videos, audio files, PDFs, documents, and other files without having to worry about security.
Secure Text Messaging for Healthcare is designed so you can freely share PHI in a secure, HIPAA compliant environment, thus improving the quality and speed of care team’s collaboration. What’s more is that secure texting improves upon standard SMS technology by providing real-time delivery and read receipts, request acknowledgment options, and broadcast messaging.
Secure Text Messaging solution gives patients an easy and convenient way to communicate with physicians and office staff. This will have a direct effect on improving patient care, increase patient engagement, and a higher level of patient satisfaction.
Automated appointment reminders for patients via email, text, and voice.
Free your clerical staff from spending time trying to contact patients to confirm their appointments. Allow your patients to be notified when their appointment is made via their choice of text, robocall, email or all three! Once notified, your patients will have the ability to confirm or cancel their appointments. Having such an automated patient appointment reminder solution within your workflow can benefit your practice by increasing patient satisfaction, cutting down on no-shows and freeing up time for the front desk to engage with current patients.
Automated patient follow-up surveys
It is crucial for your practice to know when there has been a negative patient experience and have a critical time-sensitive follow-up information to rectify the issue. Conducting patient satisfaction surveys in your practice can lend exceptional insight into how you can improve quality, care, and referral rates. Satisfied patients are essential to your practice’s continued success in the future. Capturing the level of patient satisfaction as close to the day of care is extremely important and gives your practice the ability to proactively address a bad outcome. You can customize your patient surveys to track Key Performance Indicators( KPIs) which will help your practice have an understanding if your meeting these objectives. KPIs are important to your practice’s objectives because they keep objectives at the forefront of decision making. It’s essential that practice objectives are well communicated across an organization, so when people know and are responsible for their own KPIs, it ensures that the business’s overarching goals are top of mind.
