Improve your patient engagement with data-driven communication

How can your healthcare organization improve patient engagement with data-driven communication? Let's use Amazon.com as an example.

It’s your grandmother’s birthday, and you’ve traveled down the Amazon.com rabbit hole in search of the ideal gift. A day later, you see that premium crochet set pop up right there in your Facebook feed. The perfect reminder of the perfect present.

This is data-driven communication at its finest. What if we could send targeted, customized messages to our unique healthcare populations in the forums where they live, work and play every day?

Improving patient engagement initiatives by streamlining data and communication can help support population health management and value-based care goals, reduce costs and help organizations improve the overall quality of care. 

Reach the disengaged

Many people today take a proactive approach to their health. From fitness to food, people are accepting more personal responsibility for their overall well-being. But how do you reach the disengaged populations that are tying up the majority of your resources? Identifying who makes up your most disengaged groups can help you address the communication gap the right way.

Choose the right technology

Communicating regularly and seamlessly with patients can encourage more frequent check-ups, helping to prevent future acute care visits and reducing readmission costs. In order to accomplish this, it can help to determine where and how your most disengaged populations communicate and where information gaps may be occurring internally. Look at your data infrastructure across the continuum of care. No matter where you currently stand with transitioning your hospital towards digital information management, there may still be some patient or internal communications delivered by paper. Having technology in place that can properly manage this unstructured data can help you create an enjoyable care experience for patients.

Customize your message throughout the path of care

Use the data you have about individual patients and population groups to develop direct messages that are most appropriate to the recipient. This can help you maintain greater control of the conversation to help guide patients along their care journey. Facilitating customized, complete communication from the moment a patient is admitted until discharge can help all staff members to receive the right information — when and where they need it.

Improve post-visit understanding

When patients and families leave the hospital, they are often in a fog. They may not understand or recall exactly what happened or what the physician instructed for at-home care. Taking steps to improve the understanding of post-visit care can help reduce avoidable re-admissions and unnecessary costs.

Population health management and value-based care go hand-in-hand, and patient engagement is at the center of it all. So the next time Google selects an ad made just for you, imagine a world of satisfyingly accurate healthcare communication.