Providers need access to the right patient data at the right time and in the right format to provide the best possible care. 

Easier said than done, of course.

Shifting toward value-based care requires providers to evolve the way they coordinate to deliver care across multiple organizations and specialties. With this transition comes the need for a complete view of each patient to provide quality care and communication.

What makes this possible? A robust CRM solution. 

At Silverline, we call this patient 360. Having that complete view of a patient — from their communication preferences to social determinants and past medical history — can make all the difference when it comes to helping patients lead their best lives.

5 reasons why a 360-degree view of patients in healthcare matters

The concept of a 360-degree view of a patient simply means you have a comprehensive picture of the patient based on data collected from various points along their care journey. It includes clinical and non-clinical patient data such as: 

• Current health conditions
• Social determinants of health
• Medications
• Appointment history
• Family history
• Daily activity and lifestyle
• Communication preferences

When these all come together in one centralized location, it enhances the experience for all stakeholders. Providers are able to access data when and where they need it, patients receive more personalized care, and everyone across the patient’s care team has access to the same data to inform care plans and in many cases improve health outcomes, reduce errors, and save lives.

Gaining a cohesive picture of patients has other positive impacts on the overall healthcare business by:

• Operating from one source of truth
• Surfacing more information on medical history and current lifestyle to create better care
• Identifying care gaps and addressing high-risk situations, supporting proactive care that reduces cost and improves outcomes
• Creating targeted marketing programs
• Encouraging deeper relationships post-care, changing patient behavior for successful recovery

Building a complete view of your individual patients adds up to a real-time picture of your overall population, opening up a whole world of predictive analytics at your fingertips. Armed with this information, providers can make smart decisions about services, scheduling, digital tools, and more. 

Here are five reasons building a 360-degree-view of the patient can build better care for individuals — and make your practice that much better:

1. Know what your patients are looking for

Organizations that understand their consumers and patients and regularly engage with them in their preferred medium will have greater long-term loyalty and achieve better health outcomes. 

Start by understanding the variety of options that exist in creating self-service, mobile, or digital experiences. Then, align those capabilities to your patient or member needs. This includes robust capabilities around UI/UX, data analysis, process improvement, consolidation of applications, and elimination of disparate entry points. 

For instance, is your average patient a parent who needs child care during the appointment? Or do they lack access to public transportation, so they can’t make it to your office? Finding out these pieces of seemingly unrelated information can make a big difference in knowing what your patients want in their provider — and how you can provide it.

Research shows better patient engagement leads to better health outcomes. Allowing patients to self-schedule appointments through a mobile app or online portal supports patient engagement. Patients can view test results and essential healthcare data. This builds trust, another foundational element of any strong relationship.

This is especially important as providers compete for younger consumers. Millennials are actively looking for providers that offer digital access to their health records, appointment scheduling, and preventative care advice.

2. Meet consumers where they are

The pandemic forced healthcare organizations to digitize the consumer experience and ramp up their digital capabilities to stay connected to patients. If you already know that a certain percentage of your patients would prefer a telehealth visit over a physical one, then it’s up to you to meet them where they are and offer that service. Otherwise, they’ll find another provider who can.

The digital tools and core devices that patients already use every day provide a path to increasing brand loyalty by helping them with tasks such as: 

• Identifying a provider
• Scheduling appointments
• Viewing test results
• Paying bills

By communicating through digital tools, healthcare organizations are speaking in a language of the growing digitally inclined consumers prefer and doing so on a timeline that works best for them. This builds trust — another foundational element of any strong relationship — and digitally inclined consumers are more likely to trust and interact with providers who communicate digitally. 

Once you understand how your patients engage with your communications, you can start to identify appropriate campaigns to target individuals with additional services of interest. 

Integrating demographic information, claims data, call center information, market intelligence, and clinical data with business intelligence and predictive modeling tools allows providers to identify clinical propensities and channel preferences to create targeted, actionable, go-to-market plans to retain existing patients, acquire new patients, and improve marketing ROI.

3. Empower patients to take charge of their healthcare

Pandemic or not, no one enjoys waiting rooms, filling out forms, and ordering prescriptions. 

Patients must often perform administrative tasks like searching for documents, filling out multiple forms, re-explaining their symptoms or medical history, and sorting out insurance. This means today’s patient experience is still surprisingly redundant and inefficient — and patients are tired of it. 

Consumers know that you have the data and expect you to use it. Digital tools can remove many of the least enjoyable parts of healthcare, changing the experience from negative or neutral to positive. The more information you have about your patients, the less hoops they have to jump through to feel better. Suddenly, they’re part of their health and wellness conversation.

4. Personalize the consumer experience

In borrowing retail’s personalization tactics, healthcare organizations can use consumer health data to better engage patients and their caregivers, ultimately driving better clinical outcomes. Creating a true omnichannel experience that is unified and unique to each customer will ensure they always have the right message/services, at the right time on the platform of their choice.

With more on-demand consumer data, clinicians can build care plans that align more specifically to individual health goals. They can also build more awareness of specific services, issues, or preventative care patients should undertake at different milestones — say, advertising support groups for ex-smokers or mammograms for women turning 45.

5. Keep working toward greater interoperability 

A key consideration in the shift to value-based care is the incorporation of non-traditional health data. This includes social determinants, in addition to clinical data. It’s important to include factors like food security status, housing stability, and access to reliable transportation into patient records.

Use this to proactively identify a health risk within a target population and intervene to work toward positive outcomes. With interoperability, the more systems that can “talk” to one another, the easier it will be for providers to understand the full picture of a person’s health — which isn’t just their lab results or specific symptoms, but a complete look at how they live, work, and play.

How Patient 360 builds value-based care

Connected systems promote better quality and continuity of care. More than that, connecting each member of a patient’s team and sharing needed resources keeps patients out of the hospital and leading healthier lives.

A 360-degree view of your patients provides you with a full understanding of a patient. That means your healthcare team can engage in the right channel, at the right time, and with the right content or message – at every point in the individual’s healthcare journey.

Changing consumer demands mean your customers expect more from your healthcare organization. By understanding the digitally inclined consumer and effectively engaging them, healthcare organizations can satisfy both preference and practicality.

Create a 360-degree view of the patient with Silverline

It’s more important than ever to consider cloud implementations like Salesforce Health Cloud to securely store and coordinate data. Additionally, predictive analytics powered by Salesforce Einstein and integrated with Salesforce Health Cloud enables healthcare providers of all sizes to discover insights, predict outcomes, recommend next steps, and automate tasks for business users. 

Talk to one of our healthcare experts to transition to value-based care with ease.