Last updated 03-05-2020
By:
Natalya Bucuy
Three doctors walk into a bar.
“I’ll have a beer,” says John, a general practitioner.
“A whiskey for me,” Jason, an eye doctor, tells the bartender.
“Bees Knees for me,” says Dan, who is a dentist.
This little anecdote does not have a punch line. The evening goes on with these three professionals unwinding, talking about the challenges of their individual healthcare practices.
The difficulties that arise in each branch of the medical profession vary from the others slightly, but they do have quite a few commonalities.
Evening bar scene aside, healthcare providers everywhere face similar issues.
According to Deloitte Survey of U.S. Physicians conducted in 2018, doctors name paperwork, communication and care coordination, and insurance-related issues as top pain points in the medical field.
In the year 2020, innovation and technology inhabit every area of human lives. It comes, then, at no surprise that technology can remedy many of the pain points with which all medical professionals deal.
Here are four types of digital health tools medical professionals can implement in their practices to ease some of the industry pain points.
Virtual doctor apps, telemedicine
Doctor’s orders – there is an app for that; and a wide variety of them.
Interestingly enough, the concept of telemedicine is almost as old as the telephone itself. In 1925, Science and Invention magazine published an illustration of a projected invention that would allow doctors to examine patients remotely.
While that’s not a reality yet, telemedicine is a great digital health tool and a growing industry that is only getting bigger. More patients use the phone, video, and live chat service to connect with their doctors. According to one report between 2016 and 2017 telemedicine usage rose 53%.
The range of services telemedicine provides varies. Applications that offer simple appointment scheduling, like Zocdoc, help doctors and patients keep organized in an efficient way. More treatment involved apps can offer instant messaging capabilities to chat with a doctor over live chat, phone, or video.
Healthcare marketer Waxcom cites three main reasons for the recent rise in telemedicine popularity:
- Higher life expectancy and a growing number of older patients in need of ongoing care.
- Demand by patients for improved convenience and efficiency of healthcare delivery.
- The urgent need to reduce the number of hospital stays to balance the increased requirement for beds.
Telemedicine addresses some of the pain points health professionals face, such as struggle with patient communication and care coordination. Besides convenience and the ability to provide remote care, telemedicine has additional benefits:
Patient engagement and patient motivation.
Going to the doctor can be an exhausting process. A patient must make an appointment months in advance, confirm it, drive to the doctor’s office, wait in the waiting room, wait in the exam room, fill out tons of paperwork, see the nurse, then finally see the doctor. By the end of all that the actual visit feels like such a chore, the patient is ready to just go home already.
With great digital health tools such as telemedicine, things are much easier. Scheduling appointments, connecting with a doctor and getting treatment takes place at a patient’s convenience and as easy as logging into an app. With such ease of the process, patient engagement and patient motivation become easier to achieve.
Personalization of patient experience.
Studies report that one of the most important doctor qualities for a patient is his or her personal touch. In fact, 84% of consumers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business. (Salesforce)
Telemedicine does what traditional doctors offices sometimes struggle to do. That’s personal record keeping.
Sure, healthcare practices keep records. But while those records might contain a patient’s health information they do not commemorate that personal family story or a unique detail about the patient’s personality.
Telemedicine apps, especially those that allow for instant messaging and live chats, however, contain full doctor-patient interactions. Next time a patient logs in to interact with a doctor, both parties can review all the details of the previous interactions. That’s a wonderful opportunity for the patient experience personalization.
Patients also reported meaningful connections with their providers even when using video visits. Sixty-six percent of patients said they had strong personal connections with their providers using telehealth (Patient Engagement HIT).
Feedback kiosks
One of the challenges of healthcare providers is to ensure patient satisfaction. Between busy schedules, mounds of paperwork, and communication obstacles, medical professionals everywhere have little time to ensure that patients leave their offices feeling better than before.
Such reassurance can be gathered with feedback from the patients. But feedback collection can be a tricky business. Once patients leave the dentist’s or doctor’s office they are not very likely to provide feedback about their experience.
It is, therefore essential to catch patients before they head out of the door and get on with their busy lives. Placing a feedback kiosk in the waiting room or lobby provides an opportunity to submit feedback.
Once a practice understands more about patients’ concerns, it can learn from them and put forward efforts to transform these concerns into highlights of the patient experience.
Additionally, digital health tools such as feedback kiosks have capabilities to boost online reviews of the medical practices and even facilitate referrals for friends and family. That creates a valuable resource for future practice expansion.
E-mail and Live Chat Communications
With patient communications as one of the top pain points in the healthcare industry, email and live chat interactions can serve as great digital health tools.
Communicating with patients through digital channels can allow for more flexibility for both parties. Without time constraints on responses, contacting a doctor regarding an issue or delivering test results to a patient can become easier tasks.
Additionally, implementing omnichannel communication strategies helps all doctor-patient communication channels to work together. Such communication unity can really improve benefit any medical practice. Free live chat software can be a good place to start. Later, adding live agents could serve as a good strategy.
The main issue with digital communication in healthcare is security. Doctors and patients exchange private and confidential information. Whatever digital channels they use must be secure and must comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) of 1996.
As long as a medical practice sets up HIPPA-compliant safeguards for its digital communications, this digital health tool can create a smooth exchange of information.
Another communication option can include an outsourced live chat service. The service combines the efficiency of live chat with human agents. Office personnel can continue to go about its business while it’s now the job of live chat agents – skilled and trained – to handle all patient communications through live chats. Outsourcing non-core functions of a dental practice is generally a great idea as it saves on cost while increasing efficiency of your core tasks.
Communication overload problem solved!
Wearable and smart technology
The first pedometer appeared in Japan in the 1960s. Since then, wearable technology that aids health and activity tracking has been improving dramatically.
From Fitbit activity tracker to smartwatches, to fitness belts, the variety of wearable digital health tools available now provides choices to health enthusiasts everywhere.
When health professionals encourage the use of wearable technology to their patients, they open up two avenues for patient motivation – the accountability of the patient and another source of patient data collection.
According to one study, “data from wearables can be used as a secondary diagnostic tool. Users can see their data instantly and use this information to change their activities. They can also determine when to contact a nurse practitioner for further assessment.”
The study further concludes that wearable technology provides the “ability to help empower and emancipate patients and increase patient-centered care.”
Bottom Line
Technology is everywhere in the modern world. So it only makes sense to use it in places like medical offices. Doing so can ease some of the pain points both doctors and patients experience.
