Key Patient Engagement Trends to Watch 

Today, consumers use product reviews and star ratings as key factors in making everyday purchase decisions, and searching for a new healthcare provider is no exception. According to a recent report by YouGov, online provider reviews and star ratings have become crucial influencers when choosing a new healthcare provider, superseded in importance only by insurance acceptance and location.  

Surprisingly, the place that most patients find reviews is not Healthgrades.com or a health system’s website. Instead, Google Business Listings are the most used source of provider reviews, with over 70% of respondents in the YouGov survey saying they trusted its reviews over other sources.  

Organizations that are not already actively tracking provider performance on Google are ignoring consumerism in healthcare at their peril. Now is the time to put a strategy in place to ensure you are protecting your organization’s reputation.  

A recent MGMA poll found that 64% of healthcare leaders are prioritizing patient access and scheduling as their top patient engagement priority for 2023, with 47% indicating that online patient self-scheduling, above all other tools, was the most important function to achieve success.  

Companies entering the consumer healthcare market, such as CVS, have considerable technical expertise at their disposal to help them deliver a smooth patient scheduling experience; established healthcare organizations need to deliver a similar capability to remain competitive.  

Another finding from the YouGov report revealed that patients want appointment scheduling functionalities on Google Business Listings, which is logical considering the patient-as-consumer mindset of convenience and the role of reviews in selecting a new provider. 

Perhaps above all else, patients value online patient self-scheduling and want to use it. A recent study found that when other factors are equal, 81% of patients looking for a new primary care physician and 77% of patients looking for a specialist will choose the provider that offers online scheduling.  

 According to the CDC, 60% of Americans are living with one or more chronic diseases. A recent Forrester survey predicts that a quarter of this population will be using a remote patient monitoring (RPM) tool by the end of 2023. A research director associated with the study theorizes that long-term effects of COVID-19 may fuel the rise in RPM use, due to the disease exacerbating chronic conditions.       

It seems like every day there is a new device or smartphone app that can help you with some aspect of managing your health – from weight management to monitoring your heart. Because these tools are now ubiquitous in the marketplace, patients will soon expect their providers to make use of the information to inform medical decision-making. 

The challenge is harnessing the information in a way that is meaningful and will impact care, leading to better health outcomes. Each monitoring device and app will be collecting its own information, and the risk is that the information will remain siloed because there is not an effective way of delivering data to the provider and the provider using the data to inform a care plan. This disconnect has the potential to frustrate patients and providers alike.  

Positive health outcomes are the cornerstone of success for all healthcare organizations. But, how can you predict if a patient is likely to be successful in managing their condition? Gauging patient satisfaction, engagement, and activation has been shown through various studies to be an accurate indicator of care plan outcomes.  

Patients with high rates of patient satisfaction, engagement, and activation are more likely to be invested in their care and follow-through with adjustments to their care plans. Unhappy and unengaged patients are more likely to drop-out of actively managing their condition, potentially leading to adverse health events.  

Giving patients the technology they have come to expect from providers, such as online scheduling and secure messaging, is important not only for healthy outcomes but also to satisfy demands for convenience as consumerism in healthcare continues to grow.   

Many patients and providers would agree that a benefit of the pandemic was the increased availability and adoption of telehealth visits. In fact, 60% of providers agreed that telehealth allowed them to deliver high quality care.

Before COVID-19, telehealth was on the radar for many, but not an immediate need, and not fully utilized if it was available. For example, Johns Hopkins saw only a few dozen patients virtually per day before the pandemic. In contrast, they conducted about 5,500 visits per day during the pandemic, and their CEO anticipates that up to 30% of visits will be online after COVID-19 abates.  

If the long-term effects of COVID-19 fuels the use of remote monitoring as the Forrester study about RPM suggests, it stands to reason that virtual visits will be used for some of the check-in appointments to monitor these patients.  

In addition, the proliferation of home health tests, encompassing a range of conditions including COVID-19, urinary tract infections, cholesterol, and sexually transmitted diseases will likely result in virtual visit requests by patients.  

Congress has recently acknowledged the convenience and popularity of telehealth by extending Medicare virtual visit benefits put in place during the pandemic for two years. The motivation behind this move isn’t purely to meet consumer demands. Older populations stand to benefit from the improved access to care that telehealth provides.

According to Gary Hamilton, CEO of InteliChart, “When talking about chronic disease and chronic populations, there are a lot of factors that must be considered. Being able to provide telehealth (means) you’re more likely to have a patient adhere to prescribed care.” And healthier patients result in lower costs.  

How to get ahead of the trend:  

Formally integrate virtual visits into your clinical workflows 

A successful telehealth program begins with the right technology. During the pandemic, many providers turned to the most convenient virtual visit solution at the time so they could deliver care quickly. Now that COVID-19 is coming to a close, the solution that was right then may not be the solution that will fit your organization’s needs of the future.   

Evaluate if your virtual visit solution is the best choice moving forward. Consider functionalities such as: 

• Customizable dashboards to help providers and staff work more efficiently  
• Integration with other patient engagement tools, such as patient intake, to streamline workflows 
• The ability to mimic in-person visits with staff check-in and hand-off to a provider, to allow the provider to concentrate on care and not administrative tasks 

 After you are confident in your technology, consult with your organization’s stakeholders to evaluate where virtual visits are most useful and build a program to integrate them into clinical workflows and set goals. For example, if you determine virtual visits are suitable for medication monitoring, set a target to achieve a certain percentage of follow-up medication monitoring virtual visits.  

Not only are virtual visits convenient for patients, but they are cost-effective for providers. Migrating a percentage of encounters to virtual visits can save labor and reduce overhead costs while improving health outcomes. 

The virtual visit solution you chose during the pandemic may not meet your needs of the future.

It’s critical to set your patient engagement priorities for the future and start laying the groundwork today to ensure that your organization is ahead of the curve. 

We suggest evaluating your use of online patient self-scheduling, digital patient surveys, and virtual visit technology as they will have the greatest impact on your organization’s future.  

Here are some key things to consider when evaluating each:  

Online patient self-scheduling 

See how far your current online patient scheduling technology will take you. Often, we are too caught up in our daily routines to take the time to educate ourselves about the enhanced capabilities of the tools we use. Ask your scheduling vendor questions such as: 

• Can my scheduling tool be used on third-party websites?
• Can patients without a portal account (new patients) use the scheduling system?
• Are decision-trees available to help patients make the right type of appointments? 

If the answer to any of the above questions is yes, implement the functionality as soon as possible. If your scheduling system does not offer these capabilities, it may be time to start researching a new solution that can help you keep up with the competition.