With the dynamic landscape of the healthcare system, healthcare providers and Public Health experts aim to enhance the quality and provide better care. As the healthcare system is progressing, we must ensure that it is patient-centered and patients are involved in every step of the care given to them.

Patient engagement has become a very important factor for healthcare providers. This not only increases patient satisfaction but also improves their health outcomes and strengthens the doctor-patient relationship. 

Have you ever wondered how engaged your patients are beyond the premise of the clinic/hospital?

How are you tracking their progress between visits?

Are they taking the medicines prescribed by you?

Will they come back to you on time for a follow-up visit? 

If you are looking for ways to enhance your patient engagement, you are at the right place at the right time, keep reading to know how. 

• Digital Practice:   Your patients want your practice to be easily accessible at their convenience. They desire simple ways to schedule appointments, reduce waiting periods, the option to connect remotely when need be, and access the reports and prescriptions at their fingertips. Patients have climbed on the digital bandwagon and are ready for technological engagement. Your patients already interact daily with different technologies, so consider employing those to boost engagement; however, you’ll need to ensure its delivery is simple, seamless, and centered around the patient experience.

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• Personalized Recommendation: Patients demand experiences to be more custom to them. The more you develop a culture beyond the clinic to one that connects both patient and provider through a digital culture of wellness, communication, and personalization, the more your patients and your practice will benefit. Customized sms, medicine reminders, emails, in-app notifications, and birthday text are just a few of the ways to show your patient that you care about them and that their well-being is important to you. 

• Family Health management: More than their own health, the health of their loved ones is important to them. They become proactive to maintain and restore the health of their parents or the health of their children. Having a solution that has incorporated the family member's health data also onto its platform relieves the stress. Being a healthcare provider increases your footfall and builds trust and reliability.

• Care Coordination: When a patient walks out of your clinic, they are often left with questions like What if I have some doubts? What Next? Hence it is very important to have a system that makes sense of all the data stored in it and informs the patient- What activity (consultation/diagnostics/PharmacyRefill etc) should be done next, When should the next activity happen, Whose responsibility is it to get it done & Where should the activity be performed. This ensures improved patient health and increased revenue by maintaining a continuum of care. 

• Collection and storage of patient health records: Loss of old health records, carrying huge files for every visit, and missing out on important reports are a few of the problems which come in the way of a better patient experience. Innovative technology solutions need to be employed that store all the current health data, allow the addition of old health records, and analyze and interpret this data. The National Health Authority(NHA) is moving towards ABDM (Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission) and incentivizing hospitals/clinics that are providing and accessing digital records. So, this is the right time to take action on digitizing operations and finances and capturing clinical data at healthcare setups. This also saves the time a doctor spends going through the reports, thus giving the doctor more time to interact with the patient, and build comfort and rapport. 

A research study published in 2021, studied hospital using EMR (Electronic Medical Records) for 10 years. The results from them were fascinating, it showed 56% reduction in cost of operations due to digitisation and 78% improvement in healthcare quality.(1)

It is the need of the hour to make the healthcare system patient-centric. Technology solutions can enable healthcare providers to deliver personalized care while reducing operational costs. Going digital for your practice will convert the reactive and fragmented system into a proactive well-coordinated system. If you are convinced about taking your practice to the next level, look nowhere, reach out to ABDM-compliant practice management software Chakra by NanoHealth. Reach out to us and within a week see your clinic/hospital transforming for the better. 

Reference: 

Value of the Electronic Medical Record for Hospital Care: Update From the Literature By Aykut Uslu, Jürgen Stausberg Year: 2021 Container: Journal of Medical Internet Research Volume: 23 Issue: 12 Page: e26323 DOI: 10.2196/26323 URL: https://www.jmir.org/2021/12/e26323