70% of the customer experience is based on how the customer feels they are being treated. Optimizing your digital customer experience to reflect customer needs will improve your customer service and engagement. Since the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need for digital care, many patients find they prefer a digital customer experience for managing their health needs.
We’ll offer some essential tips for optimizing your digital customer experience to improve patient care and operational efficiency. Healthcare organizations that prioritize their digital/mobile health applications to have clear communication and easy-to-navigate services will provide superior care.
Simplify Communication Channels
To optimize the digital customer experience, healthcare/pharma professionals need to prioritize the accessibility of their products and services through simplified communication channels. Your services need to be accessible across a wide variety of devices, such as:
- Smartphones
- Desktop/laptop computers
- Tablets
97% of adults have a cellphone and 85% of adults have a smartphone. ‘You’ll want to target and optimize health services, communications, and documentation for easy access through a mobile health application (mHealth). The mHealth market is slated grow at a compounded rate of 11% from 2022 to 2030.
60% of patients regularly use mobile health applications to manage their healthcare. From a central healthcare application, patients can:
- Schedule appointments
- Contact their physician
- Send, track, and receive health data
- Access health services and information
Consider the Timing of Communications
You’ll also want to consider when you send communications to your patients and customers to optimize patient engagement. By improving the timing of your communication, you can reduce patient no-shows. Set these reminder messages to improve communication:
- Immediate text or email when the patient schedules the appointment.
- A reminder email or text within three weeks from the appointment. Sending this reminder can improve attendance by 126%
- A reminder email or text within a week of the appointment. Sending this reminder improves the patient will be there by 152%.
- A reminder email or text within 24 hours of the appointment. This gives the patient one last reminder that can help them resolve conflicts that may have come up.
These reminders can be automated through a scheduling mHealth application.
Want a more efficient way to manage healthcare administrative tasks and scheduling? Sign up for an interactive demo of our Smart Care Routing solution.
Related: 7 Methods to Improve Patient Outcomes
Optimize Content
For most patients, medical terminology can be difficult to understand and follow. This is particularly challenging when they are often responsible for symptom management, medications, and long-term care once they leave their appointment or the hospital. You’ll want to simplify communications to be short and easy to understand to improve their overall experience.
By reducing the complexity, patients will be more engaged and prepared to manage their healthcare situation. To do this, you’ll want your digital communication content to:
- Assume the patient needs a better understanding of the information.
- Use plain language and easy-to-read fonts.
- Be easily accessible to view critical information and lab results.
- Utilize charts, visual aids, and images to simplify complex concepts.
- Provide additional information about their medications with easy-to-follow steps.
- Provide peer support through mHealth support groups to connect with others in similar situations.
Determine the Cadence
When sending messages and alerts to help patients manage their treatment, you’ll want to optimize these alerts to arrive just in time so that it is a welcome reminder instead of a pesty nag. This can be automated with their treatment schedule or based on patient data input.
You’ll also want to allow patients to customize their alerts so they don’t become annoyed with the mHealth application. Giving patients control over how they prefer to be alerted will increase their willingness to engage with the app and improve their overall digital customer experience.
Learn more about how our Smart Care Routing technology enables your healthcare organization to automate triage, patient communication, and administrative tasks.
Related: Patient Engagement in Healthcare: How Can I Improve It?
Maintain a Webside Manner
Even with digital communication, bedside manner matters. You’ll want to ensure your mHealth app, and digital communication has an inviting webside manner that emphasizes:
- Mindfulness
- Verbal Empathy
- Sentiment-congruent prosody
- Establish a relationship
- Acknowledge suffering
- Promote healing
When medical professionals conduct virtual doctor visits, they should also follow these American Medical Association tips to improve their webside manner:
- Center the medical professional in the frame.
- Eliminate background items that can distract.
- Confirm anyone in the room is necessary and approved by the patient for HIPPA compliance.
- Feel comfortable asking the patient to adjust lighting, position, or furniture to have a better view to do exams.
Use Data To Make Improvements
The Harvard Business Review states that data collection can dramatically improve digital healthcare by improving how we collect data from electronic records, patient feedback, IoT, and wearable devices. Artificial intelligence and machine learning accelerate analyzing and processing real-time data from a larger data set to deliver more accurate treatment options and results. This allows for real-time analysis and treatment correction if needed.
Of course, accessing, collaborating, and keeping this data private is a challenging feat. It will require:
- Standardizing collection and access.
- Replacing the paper-based records.
- Creating software that can facilitate safe collaboration that maintains patient privacy.
- Automating data extraction, auditing, and data cleaning to improve data accuracy.
Optimizing the Digital Customer Experience Will Improve Patient Care
When you follow these useful tips for optimizing digital customer care, your patients will notice the difference and become more engaged through your mHealth application. You’ll want to emphasize clear, easy-to-understand, and digest communication as well as valuable digital services for scheduling and managing care.
Clearstep’s AI tools can optimize operational efficiency and improve the patient experience. Our Smart Care Routing™ technology seamlessly integrates with your mHealth applications to reduce staff stress and automate everyday tasks. We want to help facilitate providing the best patient care and experience.
