Providing excellent healthcare improves a patient’s health today. Empowering patients to play a more active role in their own health journey while delivering quality care enhances well-being for years to come.
To increase patient engagement, your practice must first understand crucial barriers, strategies to overcome them, and how to measure your practice’s patient engagement rate.
What Is Patient Engagement?
Patient engagement involves the efforts of a healthcare provider and their staff to connect with patients and encourage them to be actively involved in their own healthcare journey. An engaged patient feels empowered to make decisions on preventative care and any treatment options while an unengaged patient is less likely to play an active role. There are many ways providers can facilitate patient engagement including actively listening during 1:1 interactions, providing helpful educational materials; offering access to an online patient portal, and asking for patient feedback.
Signs of positive engagement can look like patients who:
- Voice opinions to providers
- Play an active role in treatment and diagnostic decisions
- Navigate the healthcare system and ask questions
- Are proactive about implementing lifestyle changes
- Adhere to medication or treatment
- Make follow-up appointments in a patient portal set up by a specialist, such as their ophthalmologist, dermatologist, or plastic surgeon
When patients feel engaged and empowered, it’s easier to deliver value-based care — quality services that deliver improved outcomes and experiences at an affordable cost. It also can lead to a better overall care experience for patients, better reviews for your practice, and more rewarding workdays for your team.
Why Patient Engagement Matters
Improving patient engagement benefits patients and your practice. A 2022 meta-analysis found four key benefits of increasing patient engagement:
- Patient compliance: Patients engaged with their healthcare and informed on different treatment options were 40% more likely to adhere to treatment and show up for appointments.
- Patient self-efficacy: The study found a positive correlation between engagement and self-efficacy, or a patient’s confidence and ability to work toward health goals.
- Increased return on investment: Patients and the healthcare providers who served them both saw a larger return on investment when engagement increased. For patients, this looked like better health; and for providers, this looked like increased productivity (or optimized level of effort required to achieve more positive patient outcomes).
- Better outcomes: Engaged patients had better treatment outcomes, including stronger medication adherence and an increased chance of patients engaging in preventive measures, such as scheduling an eye exam or preventative skin screening. Engaged patients also reported lower rates of health anxiety and depression.
This study also points out that relatively small actions can disproportionately improve patient engagement rates. Implementing a more efficient EHR and practice management system, for example, can make it easier for patients to engage with their healthcare journey inside and outside of your office.
When Pima Eye Institute switched EHR/PM providers, their team spent less time on administrative tasks, leaving more space to discuss care with patients. As a result, patients had a better experience in their office and were more proactive in their care.
Abbie Goldkuhl, Pima Eye office manager, said that with Nextech “our staff have a little more time with patients and they’re not having to spend as much time on the computer.”
Benefits & Challenges of Patient Engagement
The benefits of working to improve patient engagement are clear: better health outcomes, increased ROI for patients and practices, improved self-efficacy, and enhanced patient compliance. Yet, if the benefits are so impactful, why aren’t all practices working to improve patient engagement?
Unfortunately, improving patient engagement comes with its own challenges. Obstacles range from misinformation about healthcare options to socioeconomic factors that negatively impact patient health and foster a mistrust of the healthcare system.
Some factors, such as patients’ access to healthy food, aren’t entirely within your control. Others, like investing in the right technology to set up an easy-to-use patient portal or finding ways to reduce wait times before appointments, absolutely are. Like most things in life, it’s best to focus on the factors you can control and ensure your practice offers the best patient experience possible.
Health Literacy
Health literacy is perhaps the biggest challenge to patient engagement. While it’s often defined as the ability to read and understand health information, health literacy also encompasses the ability to process and make decisions based on that information.
The Center for Health Care Strategies estimates one-third of Americans have insufficient health literacy skills. This means up to one-third of your patients find it difficult to understand diagnosis and treatment information. They may not be processing that information in a way that enables better decision-making around preventative care and treatment adherence.
To improve health literacy, practice should focus on how they communicate about diagnoses, treatment options, and other information crucial to a patient’s health. Easy language fixes, such as defining key concepts and avoiding healthcare jargon, can go a long way in improving patient understanding.
Practices can also improve patient understanding with visual aids and through answering patient questions. Visual aids can be generated via technology or software like Nextech’s interactive visualization, education, and patient communication platform, TouchMD. Empowering patients to voice concerns and questions also requires a more old-fashioned strategy: creating space during appointments to ask for and address concerns.
Other actions your team can implement to improve health literacy and patient understanding include:
- Invest in technologies that help patients understand diagnoses and treatment options
- Break down confusing terms or concepts
- Translate when necessary (for example: having a nurse who speaks Spanish in the room with a patient whose first language is Spanish)
- Offer a healthcare chatbot to answer questions when staff aren’t working
- Utilize nonverbal communication, such as signaling with hands
- Ask patients to repeat information in order to assess patient comprehension
Social Determinants of Health
Health isn’t only formed in the doctor’s office. A patient’s background, work conditions, age, and other non-medical traits influence their health. The World Health Organization identifies important social determinants of health, including a patient’s employment status, education, access to food and other essentials, and any experienced discrimination.
If a patient lives in a rural area, for example, they may be less likely to make an appointment with a specialist since the distance to appointment is longer. Uninsured patients may be less likely to make healthcare appointments in fear they won’t be able to pay their medical bills. And if a patient without consistent access to electricity is prescribed a medication that needs refrigeration, they may not be able to take all doses successfully.
Your healthcare practice cannot control where a patient lives, their access to electricity, or a patient’s insurance coverage. You can, however, be mindful of a patient’s socioeconomic status and build realistic treatment plans. This may look like:
- An orthopedic practice offering free transportation services
- An ophthalmology practice investing in the right technologies to provide telehealth to rural patients
- A plastic surgery practice collaborating with the VA to provide care to veterans who can’t afford it
- A dermatology practice prescribing medication suited to a patient’s living situation
While social determinants of health are systemic, creating healthcare plans customized to a patient’s lifestyle and status often leads to better health outcomes. In fact, one landmark study linked providers’ considerations of these factors to patient empowerment and improved health outcomes.
Patient Trust
The third, and final, challenge to patient engagement is building trust. When patients trust their healthcare providers and believe in a treatment’s efficacy, they are more likely to be engaged with their care. Patient trust is built on transparent, accessible relationships with providers and practice staff.
Patients may not trust a healthcare provider for many reasons, including misinformation on medical care from other sources, systemic racism in the healthcare system as a whole, or bad experiences with similar providers in the past.
Often, cultural competency and understanding is a great first step toward establishing rapport with patients. Culturally competent care could look like office-wide training on cultural awareness or recruiting diverse staff for your practice.
Providing services in a transparent, accessible manner also strengthens patient trust. This includes communicating openly and empathetically during appointments and making it easy for patients to access healthcare information after an appointment.
For Coastal Eye, switching EHR providers allows them to bring up patient information during appointments and send it after via their patient portal. This one technology swap improved transparency in their office and after appointments.
Digital Patient Engagement
While it’s important to improve patient engagement in the office, your patients are interacting with healthcare information online too. Digital modalities, such as patient portals and communication channels like email and social media, can empower patients to take control of their health when used correctly.
However, multiple factors limit the effectiveness of digital patient engagement strategies. The most prominent include limited access to or skills with technology on the patient’s end, a poor user experience within your online patient portal, inadequate digital communication, or difficulty finding information on your website or social media.
Enhancing patients’ digital experience is within your practice’s control, and it often begins with assessing your tech stack and upgrading technology, like your EHR and PM software, when necessary.
Other steps you can take to improve digital patient engagement include:
- Ensuring your website’s flow of information makes sense to patients of all ages and digital literacy levels
- Increasing visibility on social media and in local searches for your services
- Investing in email and text message communication to remind patients about appointments and other important details; this strategy can even be automated with the right EHR and PM software
- Testing a patient portal’s functionalities before buying it in order to ensure it’s easy to use
Measuring Patient Engagement
Patient engagement barriers are as varied as the different healthcare specialties. While it’s great to be aware of the barriers out there, your practice should have a way to identify specific obstacles within your practice.
Let’s say your administrative team analyzes patient engagement throughout the patient journey. They identify difficulties in creating follow-up appointments, but high engagement rates with creating original appointments on the phone. Improvement efforts can then focus on troubleshooting the follow-up scheduling process or exploring different patient portals on the market.
If confused about finding where patients are unengaged or how to assess engagement rates, check out the specific measurements defined by the CDC. These measurements include:
- Ease in filling out medical forms
- Patient understanding of medical conditions and treatments
- Patients’ proactivity in creating appointments
- Levels of anxiety or depression regarding medical care
It’s also a good idea to measure patient engagement overall. If your practice does this before implementing any strategies to improve patient engagement, you have a baseline to measure patient engagement improvement. The patient activation measure, a score from one to 100, offers a qualitative look at a practice’s patient engagement rate.
Strategies to Improve Patient Engagement
If you measure patient engagement rates and find they are low, there are steps you can take to improve. Areas to focus on include:
- Communicate with patients: Automated reminders via email or text about upcoming appointments and other critical information are a great way to communicate more frequently without increasing your staff’s workload.
- Provide thorough education: Implement intuitive technology and intentional in-practice communication strategies to break down key concepts shared during appointments.
- Enhance the overall experience: No one feels empowered when there’s a long wait before an appointment, a confusing payment structure, or frazzled staff. By ensuring your practice runs smoothly, you can increase patients’ confidence in your practice and engagement with their care.
These three improvements can be made with one simple adjustment: choosing the right EHR and PM software. With Nextech’s intuitive and effective solution, your practice can provide an empowering and educational patient experience.
Angela Myers is a health and health tech writer with bylines in Forbes and AARP, among others.
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