By M. Usman Asim, RPSGT
Enhanced patient engagement starts long before a patient walks through our doors. Even before their first appointment, we ask a lot—pre-registration packets, medical record requests, referral inquiries, multiple appointment reminders, and early arrival instructions. But amidst all these logistical steps, how often do we take the time to truly understand the individuals choosing our practice for their healthcare? To foster deeper connections and improve their experience, we must go beyond processes and focus on meaningful patient engagement.
Putting Enhanced Patient Engagement in Action
In that digital or paper-based pre-registration packet, make the first page a bio sheet on yourself and additional medical practitioners at your office. Inform the patient that you and your practice would love to learn more about them as individuals if they are comfortable sharing this type of information. Keep it simple, ask their likes and dislikes, and leave a blank area where you invite the patient to share more about themselves, beyond just what is in their medical chart/history.
Learning, understanding, embracing, and endorsing the differences that make every patient unique, even when the medical diagnoses are the same, often allow us to achieve the best outcomes and enhanced patient engagement for each and every one of our patients. Take notes of what personal information patients choose to share with you so this can be reviewed and easily revisited at future appointments. Share this information with your staff and encourage them to engage the patient with this knowledge. When employed properly, not forcefully or awkwardly, this strategy can create a pleasant and memorable experience during all touch points from beginning to end while help produce enhanced patient engagement.
One Size Doesn’t Always Fit All
Cookie-cutter solutions and assembly line production can lead to amazing efficiencies in some fields but are rarely the right answer in medicine, especially when it comes to enhanced patient engagement. In striving to exceed your patients’ expectations, personalize it further and create a proactive verbal dialogue that identifies and then annotates what they value most in a medical practice beyond the obvious expectation of quality healthcare. This can range from a medical office’s ability to be punctual during appointments, allowing electronic patient access to medical records, or the expectation to have emails, messages and/or phone calls answered in a timely manner.
For many, reliable, responsive, and supportive after-hours support is highly valued, as is a coordinated effort between PCPs and Specialists. Higher risk patients may want doctors to have privileges at their preferred hospitals/outpatient centers, while some need clear instruction on medical guidance and goals with constant reinforcement. Most will probably want some combination of almost all these things and maybe even more. Learn what motivates your patients and use that to spark a desire and commitment to meet your stated goals for them, fostering enhanced patient engagement.
Take, for example, the often-repeated mantra of increased exercise, improved diet, and weight loss, which has become the “Yeah, yeah…tell me something I don’t know” of doctor/patient communication. When we truly know the person, not just the patient, we can say things like:
- “Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to dance the hours away at your child’s or grandchild’s wedding next summer with reduced discomfort?”
- “I want you to be able to take that dream vacation to Australia without dreading the physical strain of that long flight.”
- “If you do the right things today, tomorrow, and thereafter, then before you know it, you will be back to doing what you love.”
Coach your patients to success by creating customized solutions tailored to their persona, no matter how standard their medical ailments may be. The digitizing of medicine is necessary now more than ever, but one must not forget to retake ownership of the human-to-human interaction that has defined medicine since the beginning. Need someone to work with in order to build enhanced patient engagement? Let’s talk.