The 9 Best Patient Engagement Strategies

Demographics

Patient demographics are broad categories that can help you create better patient engagement strategies. The most common demographics include:

• Biological sex
• Age
• Ethnicity
• Race

Some healthcare providers also choose to include additional demographic options. These can include:

• Insurance information
• Medical history
• Employer
• Level of education
• Gender

A healthcare provider can create customized engagement strategies and messages that speak directly to each demographic by using basic demographic categories. This helps the message be more meaningful to the patient and can help improve engagement rates. A limitation of demographic segmentation, however, is that people sharing certain physical or situational characteristics do not all think and act alike. If they are motivated by different things, a “one size fits all” engagement strategy targeting Millennials, for instance, will not elicit maximum results.

Psychographics

Psychographic segmentation is similar to demographics because it helps organize a large population into separate categories. However, psychographics create categories based on psychological criteria instead of basing those categories on concrete physical traits and attributes.

Psychographic profiling helps predict and determine patient behaviors and, when paired with patient engagement strategies, can help address and change those specific behaviors and thoughts.

Psychographics can include:

• Motivations
• Beliefs
• Fears
• Values
• Personality
• Interests
• Opinions
• Attitude

Psychographic segments are defined by these shared characteristics, which determine their core motivations and communication preferences. Harnessing these motivations enables providers to activate positive health behaviors.

Social Determinants of Health (SDOH)

The environment in which a person lives, works, and plays can directly affect their health and view of healthcare. By segmenting patients by their social determinants of health (SDOH), healthcare providers can better tailor engagement to their patients’ world experience.

Even within the same city, people can experience very different SODH. A patient who lives in an urban food desert or a more rundown or impoverished part of town has a different experience managing and maintaining their health than a similar patient from a more affluent part of town.

Addressing and enhancing the quality of life based on SODH can significantly influence population health outcomes because it changes the narrative of healthcare. Rather than good health being a privilege of the wealthy, it becomes necessary for all.

3. Start Engagement Before a Patient Visits

If the first time your practice or facility thinks about a patient is when they first check in, you are already behind schedule with patient engagement. Before a patient meets with a doctor, you can start to build patient engagement.

Simple pre-visit procedures like intake forms, clinical reminders, and appointment reminders start patient engagement. Sharing this information well before the patient ever arrives benefits both the doctor and the patient.

Because the patient is not rushed to fill out intake forms in a waiting room and can fill out the necessary information in the safety of their own home, they can be more accurate and open about their medical history. Additionally, resolving paperwork before the appointment makes their intake significantly less stressful and streamlined, which improves patient satisfaction.

For healthcare providers, early information allows them to be prepared for any questions or concerns from the patient. They have a full medical history to work with, which allows them to start addressing their current needs, rather than focusing the first 10 minutes on getting to know the patient’s history.

4. Engage Throughout the Visit

When a car isn’t working, the mechanic diagnoses what is wrong and then fixes it. Unfortunately, this same mentality has been adopted by many clinicians. They believe it is their job to diagnose patients, provide a treatment plan, and then move on to the next patient.

While this is certainly an efficient approach to healthcare, it perpetuates the stigmas around medicine being cold and distant and serves as a roadblock to high-quality healthcare.

Patients receive better care and are more transparent about their health with someone they know and trust. When patients connect with their doctors, they are more likely to follow prescribed treatment plans, be prompt with their medication schedules, and modify their long-term behaviors.

Even small moments of engagement and interaction between a patient and clinician throughout their visit can modify the clinical paradigm and lead to meaningful and lasting results.

5. Practice Shared-Decision Making

Shared-decision making goes against the standard practices of healthcare, but it provides more patient engagement and can help reduce hospital admissions and achieve greater patient outcomes.

Traditionally, patients go to a hospital or clinic to have the healthcare professionals use their knowledge, training, and experience to determine what is wrong and how to fix it. It’s assumed that patients are uneducated and aren’t qualified to talk about their illness.

Shared-decision making changes that narrative by democratizing healthcare. Rather than the dictatorship where a clinician makes all of the decisions, shared-decision making puts the patient on equal ground with the clinician. They work together to make decisions about necessary tests, treatment options, and the final care plan for the patient.

Shared decision-making requires more time because it involves a significant investment in patient education. However, inviting the patient to participate in their own healthcare improves patient engagement and significantly improves patient satisfaction.

6. Stay Engaged Throughout Aftercare

Just because a patient is discharged does not mean they are healed. Aftercare is an essential part of any patient’s treatment plan, but unfortunately, there are times when more than 40% of patients misunderstand, ignore, or choose not to follow aftercare instructions. When aftercare instructions are complex or require major lifestyle changes, nonadherence can be as high as 70%.

Nonadherence to aftercare instructions can lead to poor health outcomes, readmittance, and even death. It’s estimated that as many as 125,000 deaths a year are due to complications due to nonadherence.

Patient engagement during aftercare improves adherence to aftercare instructions. Also, it helps establish a relationship of trust and understanding because it shows that you care about them even when they are not admitted and under your care.

Aftercare engagement can include following up on:

• Medication adherence
• Conditions and symptoms to watch for
• Payment reminders

7. Provide Continuous Care

Patients need your help the most when they visit your office. But patient care doesn’t stop once they are healthy. Patient engagement should happen throughout the year.

Engaging with your patients at least once a month is an invaluable tool in establishing trust. When patients hear from their healthcare providers when they are not in an emergency, they start to trust them more and are more likely to come to you when they need help.

Continuous care is also a great way to help patients with preventative care measures. While this is an essential part of patient care for high-risk patients living with chronic conditions, continuous care can significantly reduce health complications and medical costs for all patients.

8. Use Preferred Channels

It doesn’t matter how personal, relevant, or moving your engagement strategies are if your patient never sees them. A major part of improving patient engagement is to meet them where they are and reach out to them using their preferred channel of communication.

Each patient has a preferred channel of communication. Some potential channels that can be used for patient communication and engagement include:

• Email
• Text
• Phone
• Patient portals
• Social media
• Video conferencing
• Online messaging platforms and applications like WhatsApp
• Written mail

With our digital world, it’s tempting to lean entirely on technological solutions. Still, it’s important to diversify and offer digital-free solutions like app-less interfaces and interactive voice response (IVR) calls. By offering a wide range of options, you can make engagement accessible for every patient no matter who they are.

Using every channel for every patient is not recommended; instead, as part of your patient onboarding paperwork, include the option to opt-in for announcements and communication through various channels. This is an easy route to making the patients feel overwhelmed or pestered.

9. Track the Right Metrics

A key part of improving your patient engagement strategies is understanding what is and isn’t crucial to measure. By tracking the wrong metrics, you won’t get accurate insights into your existing strategies’ success or failure.

To get the most from your patient engagement strategy, consider tracking these metrics:
Patient satisfaction – Patient satisfaction is one of the most common indicators for measuring healthcare quality. The major reason for this is that all aspects of their experience can influence patient satisfaction, so it serves as a broad net to catch any issues.

The difficult part of only focusing on patient satisfaction is it does not always relate directly to your engagement strategies. A patient can be upset, frustrated, or even angry with the service they received but have no issue with the level of engagement that they experienced.

If you do choose to use patient satisfaction as a key metric, realize that it will require additional time and research to understand each review and determine if it is associated (good or bad) with patient engagement.

• Engagement response rates – Patient engagement is the first step in a relationship between healthcare providers and patients. However, just because you make the first step to establish a professional relationship with your patient doesn’t always mean that they will or want to reciprocate. By measuring how many patients respond, you can determine how effective your engagement strategy is proceeding.

The average response rate for patients is around 70% to 72%. For postal surveys, it’s 65%, and online surveys bring an average of 46% for web-based surveys and 51% for email surveys.

The strength of this metric is that it gives you a way to measure the effectiveness of your engagement campaigns. However, it’s essential to have a large sample size, including a diverse sample of various demographics, to get a complete idea of how the campaign is doing. This requires more time, but with more data points, you’re able to assess the status of your strategies accurately.

• Patient Activation Measure (PAM scores) – The PAM score is a 100-point scale that determines patient engagement. It provides an in-depth review of 22 items in four assessment categories within our performance levels. So, while it is one of the most accurate ways to show patient activation, it comes at the cost of taking a lot of time for each patient to complete, which lowers the average completion rate.

A short-form option reduces the survey to only 13 items to make the entire process less burdensome and costly. But, it comes at the cost of only having 92% accuracy compared to the original long-form version.

• Health outcomes – Patient engagement drives better health outcomes. This is because patients who are engaged in their healthcare make better lifestyle decisions, are more likely to obtain preventative care, are less likely to delay getting care, and exercise more positive health behaviors.

By tracking the health outcomes of patients before and after new patient engagement strategies, it is possible to track the impact of your new strategies.

• Potentially Preventable Readmissions (PPR) – PPR measures readmission rates within 30 days for reasons that are considered unplanned and potentially preventable. Like other metrics, it is impossible to draw a direct correlation between PPR and engagement rates because many additional factors can affect PPR rates. In broad terms, lower PPR rates are generally associated with higher engagement rates.

• The Patient Health Engagement (PHE) scale – The PHE scale measures patient engagement while being grounded in conceptualization and psychometric methods. The PHE model addresses all factors of patient engagement, including patient-related factors, health professional-related factors, organization-related factors, and social and community-related factors.

The biggest benefit of using the PHE model in your metrics is that it focuses more on the patient’s psychological needs that keep them from engaging with their health. Rather than showing you where your strategy lacks, PHE explains why customers are struggling with adopting the strategy.

Improve Your Patient Engagement Strategies with Upfront

Upfront provides a digital platform that utilizes psychographic segmentation and machine learning with dynamic communication workflows to drive patient engagement and behavior. Schedule your demo today to see how you can deliver unmatched results in marketing strategies and patient engagement.