Performance Marketing Expert

Prioritizing the Patient Experience: 3 Ways Marketing Can Improve the Patient Experience

Healthcare is a business, there’s no denying it. Hospitals and clinics need to generate leads and measure conversions just like any other industry. However, due to the personal nature of a doctor-patient relationship, healthcare marketers must approach their craft a little differently. The patient’s experience with their provider is a metric that is hard to accurately quantify, but vital to the success of healthcare marketers. The best advertisement is a happy patient who felt thoroughly cared for. This means the patient experience can have a direct and significant impact on any hospital’s budget. Read on for three ways to improve the patient’s experience and subsequently attract more consumers.

 

Conduct Patient Surveys, and Use the Results to Implement Reasonable Changes


It’s not uncommon for a business to ask customers to fill out a quick survey or to answer a few questions about their latest experience using a particular product or service. Gathering comments on a patient’s stay can be an effective way to engage the current patient, as well as assess how to attract and engage future patients. But the last thing a person wants at a doctor visit is more paperwork. And if they are already feeling under the weather when they are subjected to more papers to fill out, results may be negatively skewed by the additional stress.
 

Here’s where an innovative marketer can improve the process. Use web applications in conjunction with your CRM system to gather and store as much of the information you’re looking for digitally, before the visit. Not only will this be more convenient for the patient, but the data will be available immediately for analysis and action, without the additional data entry step. Staff can then leverage this information to skip directly to a deeper tier of questions regarding their current malady, relaying to the patient that they are not merely some anonymous visitor, but a valued client who’s care is a high enough priority that the staff is already several steps into their treatment plan by the time their patient walks through the office door.

 

Anticipate Patient Needs

 

By conducting regular surveys, a marketing team can start anticipating patient needs and helping hospital staff answer them before a patient even asks. An insightful marketing team can also anticipate needs that patients don’t necessarily mention. Healthcare is a broad field, encompassing many different areas of interest that don’t necessarily overlap. By compiling data gathered from patient intake surveys and their web activity across hospital resources, marketers can infer the topics that are of greatest importance to patients. Using those inferences, they can serve them informational materials about those topics, alerts when there important new developments, and even alert doctors to bring up certain topics in consultation that patients may be uncomfortable bringing up themselves.  

 

Invest in the Latest Technology


Antiquated systems are rarely good for patient morale, whether they relate to record keeping or diagnostics. By staying up to date on the latest technology and incorporating it into the hospital procedures whenever possible, administrators can help ensure a positive patient experience. Implementing an electronic patient sign-in system, sending email reminders for appointments or prescription refills, and utilizing digital record keeping programs are some of the most popular ways hospitals are joining the 21st century. Marketers can help hospitals implement these systems and use them to enhance the patient experience.

 

Why Does it Matter?


Because word-of-mouth is so important, hospital staff should be doing everything in their power to ensure patients have as enjoyable a stay as possible. According to Forbes, 92 percent of consumers, patients included, will listen to recommendations from family and friends before any other form of advertising. For that reason, an overwhelmingly positive patient experience is one of a healthcare marketer’s most powerful tools in the arsenal.

To find out more about how Rise can help you deliver a positive patient experience, contact our Digital Strategy team.

01/08/2015 at 11:00