Transitioning from a reactive to proactive care strategy requires hospitals and health systems to embrace digital transformation and roll out new capabilities that tailor care and communications to individual patient preferences.
As part of HCL Technologies, PowerObjects focuses on elevating the patient experience by providing healthcare organizations with service, support, education and add-ons for Microsoft's business applications. The company aims to help its healthcare clients digitally transform their customer and patient services and patient journey through Internet of Things technologies and EHR integrations.
During a Sept. 28 on-demand webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by PowerObjects, industry experts discussed how healthcare organizations can use communication technologies and add-on capabilities to better connect with consumers and drive patient volumes.
The speakers were:
- Duane Napier, business development director of healthcare for the North America-East region at PowerObjects
- Scott Dwyer, business development director of healthcare for the North America-West region at PowerObjects
Five takeaways:
1. Eliminate negative patient experiences. By enhancing overall communication and outreach strategy, hospital and health system marketing teams prevent negative experiences such as when a patient has undergone cancer treatment but then later gets an email marketing message from their same healthcare provider to come in for another cancer screening. This situation may make them feel like their provider isn't up to date on their health journey, Mr. Napier said.
"That certainly gives a message that the healthcare provider doesn't know you, or at least the left hand is not talking to the right hand, and that causes you to really question your overall care," he said. "Dynamics 365 really helps aggregate that lead management, the care and discharge information to reduce poor communication and to ultimately strengthen that patient experience in all stages of the journey."
2. Pre-engagement helps attract new patients. Dynamics 365's product suite helps healthcare organizations rollout pre-engagement strategies such as lead conversions, qualifying consumers to become new patients and scheduling new patient referrals to convert new leads into opportunities that will generate revenue.
3. Augmenting EHR capabilities around continuous communication, scheduling and notes. With this process, Dynamics 365 can help healthcare organizations aggregate EHR data and non-EHR data throughout the patient journey. This allows providers to check patients' personal communication preferences.
4. Streamline post-discharge patient communication. Patients can experience fatigue after leaving the hospital when they receive very similar messages from multiple different physicians and nurses. With Dynamics 365, providers can aggregate those questions and create liaisons to the patient that can help reduce these frustrations.
5. Helping healthcare organizations assume an effective field service strategy. All of these patient communication and engagement strategies are in line with PowerObjects' goal of transitioning their customers to a service-based business model, which requires concentration on patient outcomes rather than services.
"When we talk about creating revenue for the hospital or the clinic organization, we're also talking about increasing the outcome for that patient," Mr. Dwyer said. "So, if there's something we can do that can positively impact their health while also capturing revenue while onsite with the customer, we want to make sure we're capturing that in real time and taking action on that insight as soon as possible."
Click here to view PowerObjects' OnDemand webinar.