In recent years, patient engagement platforms have made strides in expanding their solutions to create an omnichannel patient engagement experience, so much so that there’s less of a need for multiple vendors. This is pushing providers to reduce vendors and to partner with one that can take a patient from the beginning of their care journey to the end. But when there’s a market flooded with options, it’s hard to choose the best one.
Here are some factors providers should consider when choosing a patient engagement vendor that’s right for them.
Will it Save Money?
There’s a very good chance consolidating patient engagement vendors saves your organization money, but before making any decisions, go through all the numbers. Just looking at the cost of the services isn’t enough either. Look at how much money will be saved in staff hours by reducing workloads through automation and how much can be gained by increasing patient payments and getting patients to go to their appointments.
But things that can go awry if the platform your organization switches to turns out to be cumbersome and unreliable. Imagine switching over to a new system, taking lots of time to teach staff how to use a system that isn’t user friendly. Moreover, it doesn’t achieve business goals as well as the solutions you used to use. It sounds like a nightmare, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Every financial aspect should be scrutinized.
Know Patient Engagement Goals
Before searching for a patient engagement platform, providers should get a clear understanding of their goals. It could be reducing readmissions, collecting more patient payments or improving the continuum of care journey. When you know what you want to achieve, you have a better idea of what you need and what you don’t, especially if some platforms have drawbacks.
That said, Upfront’s patient engagement platform spans the care continuum, offering end-to-end solutions and dozens of use cases and digital workflows. Whether for patient acquisition, retention and repeat patient visits, driving better health outcomes or even increasing patient payment collections, Upfront is the enterprise patient engagement platform that consolidates what multiple point solutions try to address, helping providers achieve all their patient engagement goals.
Understand Patient Wants and Needs
Change isn’t easy, but patients might feel especially frustrated unless the change vastly improves the experience. To determine the needs and wants of your patients, consider sending out feedback surveys throughout the patient journey (after appointments, after bill pay, etc.), not just an annual satisfaction survey. Inquire about how to improve the care experience. Are patients interested in more messaging options with their provider? Do they have numerous options to connect with a specialist to help manage their chronic condition? Can they schedule their own appointments through the patient engagement platform?
While it may sound like a lot of staff effort and time to develop, send and analyze a multitude of patient surveys, a patient engagement platform like Upfront can automate the process with user-friendly dashboards to monitor patterns and trends in patient feedback, even across many locations and providers under the same healthcare system.
Plans for Now and the Future
When choosing an enterprise patient engagement platform instead of a collection of point solutions, consider your current needs and how this platform can help you navigate changes in the future, especially as healthcare moves toward a consumerism model.
Upfront is a leader in the healthcare consumer model, utilizing the best patient engagement platform technology, omnichannel communications and advanced personalization analytics. Core to Upfront’s industry-leading personalization capabilities is a psychographic segmentation model, which allows communications to center on what motivates a patient to activate behaviors across their healthcare journey and use that information to gear messaging, content, notifications and more based on patients’ individual ideals, values and beliefs. Under the Upfront psychographic model, one patient type (Self Achievers) may be motivated by goals and personal health enhancement, while another patient type (Priority Jugglers) may be motivated by commitment to family. By tuning into these motivations, patients are more inclined to respond to your patient engagement platform and take charge of their health.
It can be daunting to look at patient engagement platforms and determine what fits your organization’s needs for years to come, but these considerations are a good start. If one of your goals is to improve the patient journey through a patient engagement platform, our whitepaper with Fierce Healthcare might be what you’re looking for.
