Digital is no longer a comparative differentiator but a normalized aspect for healthcare organizations. To be competitive and respond to new challenges, providers should continuously embrace digital innovations to enhance workflow and patient care. An example of this is ServiceNow that streamlines health IT, transforms care, and improves patient outcomes.
Despite all the intricacies of healthcare, providers have put a significant burden on patient consumers. Patients remain to be in charge of sharing health profiles before appointments and keeping in touch with providers between their visits. They often struggle to secure schedules for their consultations, and many have to enter their medical data in paper forms. Between these patient responsibilities expose a lot of pain points that taint the entire patient experience.
Although patient satisfaction differs from patient to patient, healthcare providers should establish a comprehensive patient experience strategy to improve their quality of care. This can be possible if providers will take advantage of technology to meet future demands and unexpected health crises. To shed light on the role of digital technology in healthcare, we’re listing down innovations to enhance patient experience.
Improve communication with patient relationship management platforms
The healthcare sector has a rapidly growing number of data inputs and touchpoints, resulting in a more complicated patient journey and data processing. In a recent report by International Data Corporation, healthcare data is facing a compound annual growth of 36 percent by 2025, faster than any industry. While additional data improves patient satisfaction and level of care, only a good deal of information is useful in healthcare settings.
In this case, healthcare providers require an efficient data management platform to monitor patient data, improve patient-centered outcomes, and coordinate care delivery.
With the growing need to collect, organize, and support patient data, providers rely on patient relationship management platforms in crafting a more integrated patient profile. These platforms aim to centralize all aspects of patient data, such as socioeconomic status and medical history, so physicians have access to more data sources during diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up medications. Thus, this will enable collaborative decision-making as physicians and medical staff develop a better understanding of the patient’s background on which they base their recommendations. For instance, the patient’s access to food may affect their treatment plan for their existing condition.
For healthcare corporations that offer all-inclusive services from primary to in-home care, these tools may be a great way to meet the level of care patient consumers increasingly expect, such as family-centered care and patient-centered outcomes.
Enhance decision-making through healthcare analytics
Healthcare analytics play a significant role in improving the healthcare system and patient satisfaction—clinical decision-making and operational efficiency. Healthcare providers, particularly healthcare corporations, are prone to face similar challenges faced by consumer-oriented industries.
These include dealing with workflow, including patient admission, medication management, and documentation. Even if a single workflow faces disruption, this will cause delays throughout the entire operation, leading to stress and confusion that negatively affect patient satisfaction and outcomes.
Predictive analytics address workflow challenges by predicting required resources in real-time, organizing staff schedules, and simplifying admission and discharge procedures. When done correctly, healthcare analytics will lessen wait times, lower medical costs, and enhance patient experience.
In clinical environments, Big Data promotes faster medical diagnoses and supports personalized care. Through a computer-based clinical decision support system, providers can optimize medical decisions and recommendations. For instance, for patients suffering from multiple chronic conditions, analytics can alert physicians when a specific procedure can alleviate or worsen one symptom.
Simplify administrative processes
Patients are expecting seamless transactions in every medical appointment. Digital innovations play a role in promoting this behavior, given that almost everything is accessible in just one click. Most patient feedback emphasizes the failure of healthcare providers to provide quality patient experience. Healthcare consumers share the same sentiments about their providers’ administrative process, such as appointment scheduling, access to insurance status, and online payments.
Often, patients drop their current physicians because of unpleasant patient engagements. With increasing healthcare consumerization, patients look for experiences that go beyond quality care and patient satisfaction. This is where digital patient portals come in to enhance patient experience and outcomes. Investing in this technology will help providers and clinical practices cater to a wider segment of the patient consumer population.
As healthcare providers continue to prioritize positive patient experience, it’s important to look beyond patient relationships. They can achieve this by understanding the role of health technologies in transforming patient care and meeting patient demand. This will also open opportunities to leverage digital innovations to ensure personalized patient-centric experience.
