Technology has transformed how people interact with almost every industry. Digitization brings convenience, personalization – and increased expectations about the quality of interaction with an organization. This shift has also affected healthcare, with today’s patients expecting the seamlessness and ease of access afforded by retail and hospitality providers.
If your practice is paper-based and analog, now’s the time to rise to patient expectations by digitizing the patient experience from start to finish. Here’s what to know.
The Importance of Digitizing the Patient Journey
The patient journey refers to all the touchpoints a patient has with your practice – from learning about you to booking an appointment to receiving care and handling admin and payment. With the typical patient journey incorporating numerous interactions and points of contact, bringing the whole experience under one digital roof provides a huge opportunity to enhance the overall patient experience. Digitizing the patient journey involves shifting processes away from analog solutions and towards digital ones such as web portals, online payments, SMS marketing, and phone-based booking.
Digitization allows you to:
- Direct resources away from low-value tasks
- Provide more comprehensive, consistent messaging and communications
- Create administrative efficiencies that benefit staff and patients
- Improve retention rates and reduce “no shows”
- Collect payments and send billing or Rx information
- Gather critical information in one central place
- Leverage analytics to understand what patients want and need
- Spend more time on actual patient interactions
Digitizing the patient journey brings your practice in line with market assumptions and expectations and allows you to create a more streamlined, more effective patient – and staff – experience.
Tips for Digitizing the Patient Journey
If you’re making the shift towards digital, here’s what to consider:
- Lead with digital – don’t make it an afterthought. The digital experience should reflect and complement the quality of care you provide. Whether it’s checking in for an appointment, sharing your hours online, or communicating administrative or payment information via text or portal, the experience should be seamless, cohesive, and professional. Ensure that your tech solutions sync up and work across multiple platforms and devices to avoid frustration.
- Make your digital outreach human. Your patients expect there to be a human at the other end of your digital solutions. Even if you’re leveraging digital solutions such as automatic call forwarding or AI-supported chat, your patients should feel like they’re engaging with a person, not a bot. Personalize and tailor your automated outreach, and have actual people respond to questions, complaints, or reviews. Efficiency matters, but not at the cost of the patient experience.
- Use data to bridge experience gaps. Digital analytics provide an enormous learning opportunity for providers. Regularly analyze data such as search terms, page usage maps, and even reviews to understand what people are looking for, how they use your website or app, and where your digital presence – or even practice – might be falling short.
- Manage expectations. Healthcare is increasingly leveraging the power of digital, but there are restrictions that need to be adhered to, which mean that the health experience won’t exactly mirror the simplicity of other shopping experiences. Billing, insurance, and HIPAA are just a few themes that providers will brush up against as they shift towards digital. Reduce friction by communicating with patients what can be done and the rationale behind something if not.
- Choose the right solutions. When shopping for digital solutions, make sure they work together, adhere to standards and guidelines, are accessible to your patient cohort, and make sense from a financial perspective. Some larger practices can easily implement an end-to-end large-scale digital customer experience solution, while some smaller ones may want to cherry-pick where their funds and efforts go.
Where You Practice Shapes How You Practice
A digital-forward practice sets certain expectations among patients. If you’re shifting towards a high-tech patient experience, consider whether your current address is doing your brand justice. At Gittleson Zuppas Medical Realty, we specialize in helping connect medical providers with state-of-the-art buildings and facilities – so talk to us today about finding a space with powerful connectivity, integrated tech solutions, and a forward-looking feel.