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Patient Engagement How It Benefits Medical Practice

Patient engagement refers to healthcare providers actively working with the patients regarding decisions around their wellness, & health.

By Credihealth Admin Updated on September 29, 2023 • 9 min read
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The healthcare landscape is going through a drastic shift as it aims to offer value-based care nowadays. This shift in mindset is due to patients today viewing healthcare providers like any other business. As a result, your clients expect to receive the same customer experience when making other financial investments or buying an item, such as a television. This trend is increasingly becoming common among patients as they too want the healthcare providers to offer them meaningful and tailored experiences.  One strategy that healthcare providers have adopted to boost patient satisfaction and drive outcomes is through patient engagement. But how exactly is patient engagement beneficial? Here's a guide on how patient engagement will benefit your healthcare facility to grow and remain competitive in the marketplace. 

What's Patient Engagement? 

It's first essential to understand what patient engagement is before discussing its benefits. Patient engagement refers to healthcare providers actively working with the patients regarding decisions around their wellness, care, and health. This practice involves a combination of patients' ability, skills, knowledge, and enthusiasm to handle their own care through communications that aim to enhance positive behaviors. There are different patient engagement strategies you can use, such as; 
  • Dividing your population into identical groups 
  • Offering resources and education 
  • Ensuring targeted, timely and precise communication 
  • Providing an excellent foundation 
  • Using multi-channel outreach   
A higher patient engagement offers a patient a more personalized experience. This gives the patient the freedom to request information and ask questions throughout the entire treatment plan. A higher level of patient engagement is achieved when providers, families, and patients are all part of the patient engagement. Patient engagement is a big boost for your business as it boosts accountability, quality of services, and access to information. Therefore, your patients feel a lot happier while they're receiving healthcare treatment. patient satisfaction

What Are the Benefits of Patient Engagement? 

It's best not to overlook the importance of patient engagement. It's only by doing this will you remain competitive and succeed in the highly competitive healthcare industry. Here's a look at some of the benefits implementing patient engagement strategies will have on your healthcare practice. 

  • Increased Competitiveness

The transformation of the healthcare system means that patients nowadays want to play an active role when receiving treatment. Patient engagement helps you achieve this by offering patients easy access to vital information, respecting their time, and promoting a more personal relationship. Because of the personalized services you provide to your patients, you become a lot more likable compared to your competitors. This likability also applies as matters in eligibility, opinion, and preference. 

  • Increased Collaboration 

Patient engagement involves both the patient and healthcare provider being involved in managing and looking after a patient. This creates an environment where patients feel part of the team, which allows them to think of a suitable solution together with the healthcare provider. Likewise, the practice of patient engagement improves compliance and ensures that you, as a healthcare provider, make the right decisions on behalf of your patients. However, both the patients and healthcare providers should be open to working as a team to achieve increased collaboration. 

  • Improved Patient Understanding and Knowledge

There are two kinds of patients, those who are willing to learn about their medical condition. In contrast, others opt to remain oblivious and unconcerned to know their condition is affecting their wellbeing. As a healthcare provider, you should do your best and promote patient engagement regardless of the type of patient. This will give you the perfect opportunity to educate and teach your patients about their underlying medical conditions. Thanks to this, your patient will have a deeper understanding of whatever medical condition they're suffering from and how this could impact their life. In contrast, not engaging your patients would mean that they wouldn't have a clear picture of their health condition. This is what patient engagement seeks to address, and this, in the long run, helps foster an improved relationship between you and your patients.

  •  Improved Communication 

Patient engagement has allowed for easier communication and collaboration between healthcare providers and patients. This has been made possible thanks to innovative technological tools that'll enable quick sharing of updates between these different parties. Because of this, it's become a lot easier for both the patient and healthcare provider to come to a consensus on the best way forward. This streamlined and improved communication leads to increased patient satisfaction, better outcomes, and enhanced care. 

  • Fewer Patient Visits to Resolve Complications 

Patient engagement means there's streamlined and effective communication between the patient and healthcare provider. It also ensures that both these parties have an in-depth understanding of their preferences, needs, and care options. Therefore, there's less likely that any trivial detail will go unnoticed as all the information is easily updated and accessible. In addition, this means that there isn't an issue that won't be resolved, thereby necessitating your patient to constantly come in for regular checks to identify a possible problem. 

  • Better Patient Outcomes 

Your main goal as a healthcare provider is improving outcomes. This is what you'll attain by proactively engaging your patients helps you to accomplish as it aims at resolving your patient's concerns before readmission or issue becomes more severe. Engaging with your patients allows you to accomplish this because it promotes effective, consistent as well as accurate communication and collaboration. This way, your patients play will be highly involved in managing their overall health. As a result, they stand a better chance to manage or overcome their medical condition, unlike if the patient engagement was nonexistent. 

  • Patients Play an Active Role in Managing Their Health 

Patients, in most cases, leave healthcare providers with the sole mandate of managing and safeguarding their overall wellbeing. However, patient engagement seeks to deviate from this mentality. Instead, it aims to have the patients become more involved with looking after their health and using all the available options at their disposal to get better.  In addition, patients seek help from other persons other than those at the healthcare facility to get the care they need for their treatment. 

  • Better Patient Satisfaction

Your objective as a healthcare provider should be to ensure your patients get the best possible quality of services and feel valued. Engaging with your patients allows you to accomplish this objective by providing your clients with easy access to clinical and health information. In addition, patient engagement gives them a feeling of greater power over their lives. As a result, your patients feel a lot more pleased with the quality of services offered. 

  • Building Your Brand 

You have to be diligent and do all your duties as expected if you're a healthcare provider. This will then mean your patients will be exceedingly pleased with the quality of your services. Consequently, this patient will act as your brand ambassador by sharing their positive experience to their friends and family. But this wouldn't be possible were it not for patient engagement which facilitated open communication. As a result, your patients feel treasured as they're involved in all the crucial decisions as their decision is evident to be of merit. 

  • Reduce Incidences of Cancellations 

Patient canceling their appointments is a common scenario due to a conflict of interest of when's the best time for a consultation with the healthcare provider. It's a problem that patient engagement resolves by the healthcare provider giving patients complete access to information.This means patients get to enjoy the privilege of complete access to their appointment bookings, medical histories, and care plans which best work according to their unique schedules and needs. This translates to fewer cases of no-shows or patients canceling their appointments due to conflicting schedules. Active patient engagement also reduces the chances of cancellations because your patients realize that every visit will no doubt add significant value to them. This makes your patients less prone to missing or canceling the set appointment altogether. 

  • Generate More Revenue 

Reliable and excellent healthcare services don't come cheap, which raises a lot of skepticism by most patients who see them as a way to maximize revenue returns. Patient engagement helps do away with this issue by ensuring patients are happier at all times. As a healthcare provider, you can do this by investing in apps and other tools that boost patient engagement.  As a result, your patients feel more involved and improve transparency, making them less suspicious. This means they're more willing to show up for tests, scans, or regular checkups routines. In addition, they're ready to go ahead and use the advised medication to better their overall wellbeing. These patients also become more loyal to your brand, resulting in greater revenue for your business.  

Takeaway 

Patients today want to be included in the entire process regarding their health matters rather than receiving healthcare services. This is what patient engagement is the cornerstone of helping you achieve this goal. As a result, your patients are, in the end, more connected and happier with the quality of your services, which translates to greater revenue and growth for your healthcare enterprise.  
Categorized into General Health
Tagged in Medicare
Credihealth Admin

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Credihealth Admin

Administrator & Support

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JoinedOct 2015
Wrote2,066 posts

Credihealth Admin Editorial team have extensive experience in healthcare content creation, producing health information that is up-to-date, accurate, informative, fact-based, and accessible to a wide audience.

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