How to Improve Patient Engagement

Successful patient engagement strategies use the right combination of innovative technology and organizational services. Hospitals find most success when they integrate solutions that operate efficiently with other systems already established in their facilities, such as electronic health records (EHR), workflow technology, and nurse call systems.

Technology is quickly changing the way healthcare providers are approaching patient engagement.Many are turning to online solutions to make scheduling appointments and receiving pertinent personal medical information, prescriptions, and test results quicker and more efficient. Pre-visit check-ins alsohelps expedite the information gathering process between provider and patient. By making a patient’s health records and appointments more readily accessible online, studies have shown that these advanced solutions reduce wait times, no-show rates, and patient satisfaction.

Increasingly, physicians and caregivers are learning the importance of educating their patients about treatment outside the hospital room, and explaining how new off-site monitoring programs can help them track their health remotely. Patients that realize how lifestyle and treatment decisions affect their health can help improve compliance and disease management. The increased interest in personalizing one’s own healthcare is making capturing medical data and moving it to electronic health records easier and more reliable, and keeps the patient always informed.

Depending on the objectives and your hospital’s goals for patient engagement, your healthcare practice will most likely want to utilize metrics such as the number of patients using the remote monitoring programs, number of e-mails collected, and patient satisfaction with their personal devices. This large collection of “big data”is becoming increasingly important as hospitals are making strides in understanding how to better use this information to improve the quality of their patient care. It's a worthwhile goal as health data can help us reduce re-admittance rates, better understand illnesses, improve outcomes, personalize medicine, predict outbreaks, and eliminate pandemics.

There's no shortage of new technologies designed to engage patients. Wearable devices, patient portals, health metrics tracking apps, and other innovations are empowering patients to take ownership of their care. If your hospital is looking to find patient engagement solutions that seamlessly integrate and communicate with your current systems, or are trying to establish a foundation or culture of patient engagement with patient management systems like nurse call or real-time location services, contact us at info@swc.net. We are the trusted source for communication, physical security and life safety solutions to meet the needs of healthcare providers across the country. We utilize a consultative approach to conduct an in-depth needs analysis, enabling our customers to fulfill their patient engagement vision and objectives.

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