Quick Read – Tactic 7: Personalize Your Patient Communication

You have now learned the importance of personalized patient interactions, cross media marketing, specific patient targeting, ease of use, and ideal consumer targeting. Your seventh and final tactic will be dedicated to maintaining and nurturing these leads to ensure conversions by personalize your patient communication program.

Tactic #7: Direct All Patient Leads to a Dedicated Patient Engagement Professional

Recent studies have shown that when patients are more involved in their health care choices they experience better healthcare outcomes while incurring lower costs. When given a diagnosis or treatment plan it’s not unusual for patients to become overwhelmed with questions and information. Depending on the severity of the medical procedure or condition patients may feel like they are bothering their physician with too many questions but need  Complicated medical procedures or decisions can overwhelm patients to the point that they feel that they cannot, or should not, ask questions of their providers.   However, this lack of patient involvement in decision making can lead to decreased patient compliance, higher costs, and less than favorable care outcomes.  Poor patient engagement is further compounded by provider-centric care delivery that still dominates so much of medical care.

If you’re actively marketing your facility without deploying a professional catchment system on the back end, you’re wasting marketing spend. To combat this, a dedicated Patient Engagement Professional (PEP) should be deployed to ensure each patient lead is qualified and nurtured along every step of the patient acquisition cycle.

The PEP should be well trained in insurance verification procedures, CRM / Scheduling software as well as live chat, video chat, phone and email. Each PEP should be able to hold conversational, well-informed discussions about the surgical procedures and conditions you treat and the treatment process for each. PEPs serve as the patient’s constant touch point throughout the entire pre- and post-operative process and should strive to make each prospective patient feel comfortable and informed every step of the way.

Did you know?

The average healthcare inbound call conversion rate is 4.5 %. Trained PEPs equipped with integrated VoIP / CRM software can convert inbound quality leads patients at 15-20%. How do you stack up?