The Patient Engagement Problem
The COVID pandemic has made just about all aspects of providing healthcare more difficult. One of the places that the average citizen is seeing the most difficulty with is communication. Whether it’s trying to get an appointment for a test after an exposure to the virus or the rollout of vaccines that has begun to occur across the country, healthcare could use better ways of keeping their patients informed.
The CEO of Well Health, Guillaume de Zwirek, recently sat down with Healthcare IT News to discuss issues with patient engagement. He says that healthcare ranks third worst as an industry in terms of customer service and a lot of that has to due with the fact that outbound patient communication lacks standardization and inbound communication is frustrating and ‘labyrinthine.’
Well Health offers patient communication tools, so they have an obvious incentive to point out where healthcare contact is falling short, but the goal is to reduce barriers. Whether it’s through HIPAA-compliant text messages, or as another CEO, Greg Johnson of LifeLink suggests, chatbots that can handle endless inquiries could also streamline the process. Rather than have patients that need to reset MyChart passwords or can’t get through an automated phone system, as many hurdles as possible should be removed to effective communication.
None of this is to say that hospitals and health care professionals can’t communicate. Take, for example, the case of Adventist Health Ukiah Valley Medical Center in California. When a freezer broke down, giving them only two hours to administer 600 vaccine shots before they’d expire, they were able to get the word out and use every single shot, getting many to high priority recipients as well. It’s a fantastic story of professionals thinking on their feet, and one that took the ability to effectively get a hold of people to succeed.
While freezers and alarms simultaneously breaking down is a pretty unique problem, it appears this type of last-minute communication could be commonplace. With new directives from Operation Warp Speed and the White House’s coronavirus task force that will allow states to give any excess vaccines to whoever would like them. The number of excess vaccines in a given day will vary greatly, if there are any at all, but it will create a situation where people will need to be notified ideally according to prioritization efforts, yet quickly enough to ensure none of the vaccines spoil.
Standardization and automation of communication is a great way to strengthen patient communication, and it can be done most effectively when it’s tied back to information present in a patient’s medical record. It’s what makes outreach personal and relevant, even if it’s automated.
Where Extract fits in is in creating a more complete and accurate patient record. When hospitals receive faxed, scanned, or paper results or other information, Extract’s HealthyData software delivers any relevant information on them directly to the EMR without the need for manual data entry. If you’d like to learn more about how we do this, please reach out.
