Patient engagement strategies are a key to improving patient experience and wellness. This is a fact that is widely known. What you may not know is that it has some peripheral benefits like cutting healthcare costs and boosting the hospital revenue cycle.
Professionals in the patient engagement solution market believe that to give better care for patients and lower healthcare costs, it is essential to stitch together patients’ experiences in the hospital and even afterward.
Patient engagement systems improve patient satisfaction, help doctors provide better care, and create an effective bond between patients and healthcare providers. When a patient is
informed, heard, and empowered, they feel more confident about their healthcare situations.
Moreover, when their healthcare providers follow up with them, they understand what they are going through or have gone through. Patients also feel their treatment is in the right hands. Such coordination is necessary to close the gap in care.
Continue reading to understand the four ways patient engagement and reliable assistance from healthcare providers can lead to reduced costs in healthcare.
Medication management
Table of Contents
Non-adherence to medications is a common problem. When a patient does not start or continue the medicines prescribed by the doctor, this leads to worse health and spending more money. This is where patient engagement systems come in.
Outreach of the doctors reminds patients why they should take the medicines they are on, their benefits, and non-compliance. This approach helps manage medications properly and can further reduce hospital readmission costs and ensure better outcomes in patients’ lives.
Automated preventive screenings
Automated preventive screenings is another approach of patient engagement systems that can reduce medical costs. For example, suppose a person has diabetes along with renal disease; they are susceptible to depression.
So in such a case, the engagement system can recognize this kind of data and remind the concerned healthcare provider to screen their patients not just with diabetes but for other conditions that might accompany it. This will, in turn, reduce the cost incurred for the treatment in the later stages of the problem.
Availability of educational content for the patients
Providing the patient with relevant educational content at check-in, in the waiting halls, exams rooms, and post-care makes the patient educated of their condition. This will lead to better engagement of the patient while in care.
It can be an electronic newsletter or a blog post that goes out to the patient via effective engagement systems. This approach will educate the patients, and an informed patient will drive a more effective conversation with his care provider.
This type of continuous engagement from the patient’s end pre, during, and post-care is where you get the best advantage to save your money from admin costs and healthcare in general.
Clinical research
Sometimes it gets challenging to engage and encourage patients for clinical trials. If you have a system with a feature to identify patients in real-time and determine if they fit all the requirements for a clinical trial, it can make your task easy. Can advertising also help? Yes!
Promoting clinical trials on the screens present in the waiting rooms will educate the end-users and bring awareness. This is effective because patients see the information immediately before visiting the doctors and hence can initiate conversations.
Hence, it is clear that the patient engagement solution market provides an opportunity for healthcare organizations to manage costs better and promote loyalty while increasing patient engagement. So if you haven’t incorporated it yet in your health system, get it done now.
