You can boost patient engagement with your clinic by using the tools already available to you through your practice management system.
Many patients appreciate receiving customized messages from their doctor, but manually sending these notes and calling individual patients may use too much valuable administrative time or clinic resources. Some practices avoid personalized communication out of concern that the return on investment for these resources is too weak. As a consequence, many clinics are missing out altogether on the benefits of ongoing communication with their patients.
With help from software, a higher level of personalized interaction with your patients is both possible and cost effective.
Customize your reach
Automated tools help you communicate with patients by sending reminders, birthday greetings, newsletters, and other notifications. From within your software, you can send messages to specific patients or groups and manage email lists. You can help prevent no-shows at appointments, recognize patients on their birthdays or on special milestones and provide educational information your patients can readily use. ¹
Many patients increasingly expect their healthcare to respond to their needs and lifestyles. Establishing great personal relationships between your clinic and your patients is an important and effective way to build relevance, value, and influence in their lives. In many cases, relatively simple interactions with patients can really make a significant impact.
You do not necessarily need to spend a lot of money or use a lot of administrative time to connect with patients in ways they want to be reached. Chiropractic clinics can use software tools to provide more personalization to their communications than would normally be possible in the clinic environment without spending excessive time on administrative activities. ¹,²
Individual systems can differ tremendously, so you may need to learn more about how your specific practice management software works. Your vendor may help you learn how to use the specific features your software offers.
Create communications
Within many systems, customizing patient reminders and notifications is relatively easy. Patients can choose to be contacted by email, phone, or text message for appointment reminders. Email newsletters offer a way to educate your patients about their health and provide information about clinic news.
Some programs allow you to track open rates and determine at a glance how well your communications are performing. With built-in analytics, you can also learn more about what helps make your messages more effective. ¹
Using your practice management system, for instance, you can recognize patient birthdays with a personalized message and include a health reminder or appealing offer. To add something even more meaningful for your patients, your clinic could also team up with other professionals such as massage therapists and offer a special package on birthdays.
Improve engagement
Ultimately, the purpose of these activities is to get patients thinking more about their health, seeing your clinic as a resource and regularly going to their appointments with your practice. Adopting an attitude of continuous improvement and experimentation may help you reach your goals faster.
To this end, you should experiment with different strategies and approaches until you find ideas that work best for you. If you give a new tool time to work but you do not see results from your efforts, continue making changes and testing your ideas. Methods that are not working may be wrong for particular patients, a group or your practice. You may also need outside resources, additional support from your vendor or educational courses to improve how you implement the new tools. ¹ ²
Get started with outreach and reminders
By meeting patients where they are and delivering communications and information they can use, you may connect with them better and expand your patient base. Many people are responsive to personalization and actively choose healthcare providers who make an effort to get to know patients and get them involved in their healthcare decisions and treatments.
You can use software to make this process easier and more effective. Eventually, this may help you grow your practice.
References
- Bowman, C. “Choosing smart technology to maximize dental patient relationships and loyalty.” Dentistry IQ. http://www.dentistryiq.com/articles/2017/05/choosing-smart-technology-to-maximize-dental-patient-relationships-and-loyalty.html. Published: May 2017. Accessed: May 2017.
- Sengbusch, M. “The Need For A Holistic And Custom-built CRM In Health Care.” Marketing: health. MediaPost. https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/300393/the-need-for-a-holistic-and-custom-built-crm-in-he.html. Published: May 2017. Accessed: May 2017.
