Great healthcare will always require levels of human interaction that can’t be replaced. But in an age of automation, healthcare providers need to use technology to provide a consumer-grade patient experience. Are you prepared for the consumerization of healthcare? 

As consumers, patients demand a personalized, intuitive experience. Gone are clinical services that target larger categories of patients, as well as single locations for condition-specific services. Patients today are informed, appreciate competition; they want ease of access and services catered to their specific group or individual needs. 

The transition to more consumer-driven healthcare has made every interaction between a patient and your organization even more critical to ensuring the highest level of engagement and satisfaction. Knowing where to start when incorporating CRM into a patient access center is a key component… one that can be challenging. 

When thinking about building a patient-centered experience, you’ll need to know:

• What use cases increase patient satisfaction? 
• What types of engagement drive downstream revenue? 
• How do you build a foundation that gives you a smarter start while building an enterprise CRM strategy?

What patient-centered care looks like

Patient-centered care goes beyond the interactions between doctors and patients. It’s the complete experience, from the moment a patient sets up an appointment to follow-up. As consumers become patients, they demand more from the healthcare experience through convenient, quick, patient-centric touchpoints and technologies. 

Effective patient engagement requires two key capabilities: the ability to capture insight into patient behaviors and needs while maintaining patient privacy, and the ability to respond in real time to those behaviors and needs as they change. 

Data and technology is what can help you stay a step ahead of your patient and achieve an integrated journey. A robust CRM system that includes important healthcare data tied with marketing automation and tracking can give you the overall view of your patient that is crucial in knowing how to interact with them. It can also provide tailored solutions to enable your institution’s specific needs. 

That entails:

• Consumer-to-patient conversion and onboarding
• Context-specific patient communication
• Patient retention and loyalty journeys
• Patient satisfaction journeys
• Multi-channel engagement touchpoints
• Patient outreach, reminders, and follow-up

A good patient experience is no longer the end goal; care gap journey management, chronic condition management, and other long-term relationships between provider and patient provide opportunities to transform the patient experience from good to great.

5 benefits to patient-centered care, powered by technology

Patient-centered care isn’t just a buzzword. It’s what your patients demand. But by reorienting your healthcare organization to put your patients at the center of everything you do can help every aspect of your business. 

With patient-centered care, powered by Salesforce technology, you can: 

1. Build a holistic patient profile

Oftentimes, folks have difficulty understanding the unique touchpoints for a patient within the healthcare system. With limited access to consumer, patient, and provider data via encounters, claims, social media, website usage, and patient satisfaction, patient-centered care remains out of reach.

Creating a holistic patient profile to gather info from the patient and display known demographic information that can be verified and updated as needed. This allows for the assignment to a work queue and creates a path for closing the case. It also means that anytime a patient engages with you, you have a complete picture of their health — including risk factors, social determinants, and medical history — so you can provide better care.

2. Streamline workflows and eliminate inefficiencies

When essential processes like call scripting and guidance, scheduling, referral management, insurance verification, nurse triage, and care coordination are split across separate systems, it can take time — not to mention frustration — to get the data you need quickly. 

Take scheduling, for example. Juggling clinical appointments for multiple doctors, PA’s, and nurses can be a headache for hospitals, practices, and clinics. Using Salesforce Health Cloud for scheduling support can reduce call time and guide agents through the process.

Streamlining workflows with Salesforce gives you the ability to standardize every section of your engagement workflow, decreasing follow-up times, increasing productivity, and making it easier to deliver care and information your patient needs. 

3. Empower your employees

Knowledge management in healthcare organizations often refers to static content stored in another application, notebook, or based on web searches. We believe that knowledge management should be dynamic and dispersed across Health Cloud in order to surface it when and where it’s needed.

With Salesforce, you can capture customer preferences and information easily, improving patient onboarding and efficiency, as well as capitalizing on patient interactions to improve service education and drive greater engagement and outcomes. You can empower your employees to deliver the best possible care, giving them the data and access they need to do their jobs efficiently and easily.

4. Retain more customers

Engaging consumers and patients where they are builds trust and confidence that keeps patients in the system and encourages them to refer their friends and family to your practice. According to the Beryl Institute, 70% of patients will share a positive experience with others. But your bigger risk is that 76% will share a negative one. And with a negative experience, 43% of patients won’t go back to that provider, with 37% finding a different doctor altogether.

With patient-centered care, you’re more likely to provide the best possible experience, retaining patients and turning them into advocates for your practice. Rather than constantly trying to bring in new patients, your care can speak for itself. The easier it is for a patient to interact with you — from appointment scheduling to billing — the more likely they’ll recommend you to their friends and family. 

5. Drive greater patient engagement

Establishing an efficient and interactive process with patients provides a quality-based patient experience, guiding them through the journey of care with your organization. 

Care gap management in Health Cloud, for example, allows healthcare organizations to address health maintenance or gaps in care to improve the health of their patients and meet quality standards that affect revenue.

At the end of the day, it’s about delivering a personalized end-to-end experience for your patient community.  Whether it’s providing personalized omnichannel communications based on diagnosis, demographics, or care plan activity, emails, and registration to events or education based on a specific condition, it’s all about having a 360-degree view of the patient and providing a comprehensive set of tailored experiences.

Patient engagement for Salesforce

Starting with Salesforce Health Cloud, Silverline has created a Salesforce for Patient Engagement solution to give providers a prescriptive, proven, and cost effective approach to delivering patient engagement while maintaining care delivery that is rightsized to the current healthcare environment.

We’re here to help you no matter where you are in your patient engagement journey. Explore here for more information about our patient engagement bundled offering.