Patient engagement solutions: A quick guide to benefits and features

Customized patient engagement solutions are promoting the concept of virtual visits and improving patient/caregiver/physician/doctor/clinical staff interactions. The demand for a patient engagement platform is nowhere close to slowing down. Quick access to physicians, no wait times, real-time monitoring of body vitals and storing of records electronically are the benefits of patient engagement solutions. Users of all age groups are adopting digital technology for healthcare services.

Virtual visits promote 1:1 engagement between providers, patients, and payers because all the interactions are available online on the cloud and can be accessed anytime for follow-up and other diagnosis purposes. Indeed, virtual visits cannot overtake physical visits; they still offer quality care services to categorize symptoms and only prompt visiting hospitals for chronic care, emergencies, and surgeries.

Patient engagement solution [PES] combined with telehealth and telemedicine ensures continuity and non-disruption of healthcare in these tough times. As per this report, the PES segment is expected to touch ~USD 41 Billion in 2027. Hence, there is enough scope for a healthcare business to enter into a PES business segment.

Before you dig deeper into patient engagement platforms and why you should build them, let’s first try to understand the true meaning of this term.

Patient engagement platform [PEP]: What is it?

As the name suggests, a patient engagement platform provides a solution for patient engagement. Patients are actively engaged in managing their health, know their health status and prescribed treatment and can be actively monitored by physicians and care providers. They know their vitals and their care plan journey that motivates them to improve their health outcome.

They can communicate; coordinate with doctors and admin staff to give their opinion.

Patient engagement solutions enable interaction between patients and other healthcare stakeholders through the web, mobile, and tablet devices. They help patients in reminding them about their medication, appointments, tracking and entering their vitals in the app, and also allow clinical staff to streamline workflow by automating their repetitive back-office processes.

The admin tasks include auto-scheduling of appointments for follow-ups, sending invoices, claims to payers and sending healthcare education content. With automatic reminders to upload medical images and vital reports, clinical staff will not miss on an admin task and can concentrate on cognitive healthcare tasks like checking on patients suffering from chronic diseases and serious illnesses.

What are the top 5 benefits of patient engagement solutions for hospitals?

1. Happy and engaged customers

As the name suggests, patient engagement platforms ensure that customers or patients are happy, healthy, and engaged throughout the proactive and reactive treatment cycle. Notifying them of visits, connecting them to a doctor or support, ordering medication refills on their behalf, and other features ensure that patients remain positive about improving their health outcomes.

With AR/VR integration, you can help patients suffering from life trauma by transporting them to a natural environment through device integration in their mobile application. Caregivers can also manage the above features and use the data to talk to a doctor as and when required.

2. Loyalty

Patients will advocate your healthcare software when they feel engaged and the app helps them in improving their outcomes. They will post about their progress and positive feedback for your app on social media and other channels. Your retention and feedback score will increase resulting in offering services to a wide population.

3. No wait times in emergency

With an option to scan and upload your insurance card, consent form, authorization form, eligibility information, you have already done your part in documenting your medical records. In case of emergency, all you have to do is to get admitted and not worry about furnishing the records as everything is available as part of the patient engagement solution or PES.

It decreases wait times and fastens the care delivery and treatment process.

4. Better decision making

With the automation of repetitive admin processes using patient engagement platforms, all the healthcare providers and stakeholders can view insights and vitals to analyze the best outcomes for patients. Information will be transparent and error-free because it is right in front of everyone to see in the app. By adding and measuring vitals against scores, wait times, and ROI, internal improvements can be identified.

Updated information ensures that real-time decisions can be taken without waiting for physical appointments and vitals can change frequently in day/hour.

5. Maximize healthcare output

Starting from online registration to uploading medical records to automatic scheduling, patients only have to worry about their treatment and diagnosis and not about other activities. Providers can attend more patients and clinical staff can get faster approval for authorizations and eligibility to get claims approved and paid quickly.

In a nutshell, a patient engagement solution ensures that patients are aware of all the pre and post-treatment steps and take care of their health in a better way. Improved communication between all stakeholders ensures transparency and low-stress treatment at every stage.

Top 7 features of a patient engagement platform

1. Multi-language and accessibility

With the multi-language feature included, patients can understand the app in their language and can communicate in a better way. Also, having variable font sizes, you can offer accessibility features that can help patients to view the app in their font size.

2. Adoption

Get buy-in from your staff and patients. Show your staff how patient engagement solutions improve their efficiency and reduce errors.

3. Integration with EMR system and other vendors

If your PEP platform can seamlessly integrate with an EMR, prior authorization, remote patient monitoring, claims systems, payer systems, it can offer better services to patients and they can access everything through one login. For example – bills and invoices can also be accessed if you integrate your billing and CRM system with a patient engagement platform.

4. Quick onboarding

Your software or app must provide quick onboarding to patients and staff by quick registration and information capture. Ideally, the onboarding should not require technical training and should be operable by the staff right from day 1 of implementation.

5. Auto-complete search and chatbots

Including smart search just like Google so that if a patient enters one part of the question and gets all answers in the search bar can help a patient to quickly find information. You can add automation based on responses chosen like scheduling an appointment, booking a test, online payment and more.

Chatbots can ask about normal symptoms before connecting with staff or doctors to minimize resolution and consultation time and get faster results.

6. Text, voice, and video communication

Any doubts regarding the medication, monitoring of vitals or more? You must have the ability to text or start a voice or video communication with staff/doctor in the shortest amount of time.

7. AI integration

Things like sentiment analysis help a provider know the mood of a patient and prepare treatment accordingly.

A customized patient engagement solution can cover your unique needs and requirements. It also provides flexibility to do future sprints, releases, and automation because it is developed keeping scalability and security in mind.

You can choose technology and integration systems as per your choice with full ownership and documentation and can opt for legal copyright to ensure the code is not copied.

You can plug-in and plug-out services as you desire based on changing market scenarios, business requirements, geographical conditions, etc.

At Knovator Technology, we have solid experience in developing patient engagement platforms that deliver personalized care and streamline workflow and records management systems. In a 24/7 setup, you can run a connected and customized patient engagement solution with IoT and vendor integration. We have set up triggers to automate educational campaigns, and other automation to cover the next steps in the healthcare process.

With the help of an agile, scalable, automated, smart, and intelligent patient engagement platform, you’ll be capable of providing a consolidated portfolio of services to all stakeholders.