5 essential stages of patient engagement
Like your grandfather’s toolbox, cardiology once relied on a limited set of tools when it came to providing care. However, advancements in the field have flourished in recent years. From minimally invasive procedures to enhanced imaging techniques, improved medications, and wearable technology, cardiologists have an advanced and growing toolbox at their fingertips.
What’s more: patients are empowered with increasingly convenient options to engage in their health. In an ‘always on’ world, every single touchpoint, interaction, or engagement along the journey to better heart health matters.
Forward-thinking cardiology practices are focusing on five key stages to better engage patients while improving operational and financial health:
- Care Access
- Intake Process
- Patient Visit
- Care Coordination
- Care Management
Each step becomes more impactful when convenience and timeliness are prioritized. This is especially true for cardiology practices.
Care Access: The First Step to Heart Health
How easy is it for patients to find your practice online and schedule a visit?
If patients can only call for an appointment between 9 am and 5 pm, offices and patients may miss valuable opportunities to connect. Practices that utilize online self-scheduling options or automated waitlists reduce no-shows by equipping patients to schedule and attend appointments after work or on weekends. These automated systems also benefit practice staff, who can attend to other priorities instead of endlessly answering calls and scrambling to fill cancellation gaps. Even better, staff can optimize scheduling with streamlined clinical workflows that utilize cardiology-specific content.
Intake Process: Checking The Pulse
If you have ever arrived 15 minutes early to an appointment at a new medical practice, you have experienced the tedious visit intake process. Just like access, intake is best executed with convenience in mind.
Clipboards and stacks of paper forms can become a thing of the past—we are seeing a shift to digital intake forms that allow patients to complete their information prior to appointment arrival. This streamlines the process and reduces the average length of patient visits.
Patient Visit: The Heart of the Journey
What does a visit that truly optimizes the patient and practice experience look like?
Sometimes, a successful visit doesn’t involve them coming to the office at all. In recent years, we’ve seen a rise in virtual visits, and it doesn’t look like they’re going anywhere. Virtual visits allow cardiologists to meet patients where they are, alleviating obstacles to meeting in person.
Of course, in-person appointments are often necessary. Inside the office, one-on-one care is often interrupted by mandatory electronic charting. AI-powered documentation software that can listen to a visit and convert the transcript into a structured SOAP note allows providers to stay engaged without missing details.
Additionally, with an EHR optimized for cardiologists, physicians can complete an entire clinical viewing and reporting workflow within the EHR with image-enabled cardiology-integrated PACS.
Care Coordination: Beyond the Toolbox
Effective care coordination includes offering convenient payment methods, secure communication channels, automated referrals, and patient surveys. Automated messaging and medication refills ensure patients effortlessly receive the information they need.
Office staff can be assured that messages for follow-ups, referrals, and refills will be sent no matter what thanks to automation. And when patients complete feedback surveys, practices can build a better understanding of their patients and optimize operations based on real patient needs. Practices also benefit from efficient financial management with turnkey contract audit and recovery features. This ensures that practices maximize financial performance and accurately and quickly turn charges into revenue.
Care Management: Strides Toward Recovery
Because care doesn’t stop when a patient leaves the office, care management ensures patients continue to feel supported by their provider. This is accomplished through remote monitoring, telehealth visits, and other methods of extending care past the initial visit.
Cardiology-specific solutions for interoperability help practices build a comprehensive view of each patient's health.
When patients are provided with an integrated care management plan, have access to online educational resources, and stay engaged with remote patient monitoring, they feel empowered.
Further, practices can prevent lapses in care and proactively treat their community with key population health analytics. With the help of automated messaging and monitoring systems, these efforts can be made without additional strain on staff.
The Patient Experience of the Future
A fully integrated patient and practice experience platform saves time and provides convenience to patients and providers alike. Prioritizing the patient and practice experience yields better healthcare outcomes for years to come.