Patient Engagement: Best Practices for Getting Started

Part one of this series reviewed the benefits and patient considerations when engaging patients. 

Part two of this patient engagement blog series offers practical, strategic tips for successfully launching and sustaining patient engagement initiatives. The results can be impressive.

QliqSOFT clients have, by engaging patients digitally:

• Reduced readmission by 32%
• Reduced staff overtime by 22%
• Increased clinic revenue by 24%
• Tripled vaccine clinic participation
• Increased childhood wellness visits and immunizations by 27%

As you start on your patient engagement journey, keep these things in mind:

1. Start with Governance – Governance plays a foundational role in ensuring that patient engagement strategies are effective, sustainable, and aligned with both organizational goals and patient needs. It ensures that the resources needed, communication mechanisms, and evaluation methods are provided to support the initiative. 

You will be leveraging analytics to identify patients needing outreach. Many organizations have grown analytics organically from within departments. Be sure that analytics is part of your governance team. Suppose you haven’t already started to shift to an enterprise data governance team. In that case, patient engagement can be a terrific way to break down silos and get domain experts working to understand and use the data insights they provide.

If you have an enterprise data governance team, define the relationship and dependencies between the patient engagement team and the data governance team.

Patient Engagement Team Members:

• Analytics team representation - they will provide the needed data to identify who should receive outreach. 
• Clinical, regulatory representatives are critical to ensure that business goals are met, and the interventions are clinically appropriate. 
• IT and operational representatives are critical to creating a solution that can scale and work with or enhance staff workflows.
• A marketing representative. They can be invaluable in creating posters, messaging, flyers, and social posts to promote your initiative to both patients and staff, thereby building understanding and trust.
• As with all successful initiatives, an executive sponsor is necessary to ensure that the organization gets the resources and budget needed to succeed.

Notice that this is not described as a project. This is a new and ongoing program that will start with an IT implementation project and will continue as organizations review and improve their existing focus and expand to additional needs to engage patients.

Organizations that tend to be most successful long term have dedicated resources and a Digital Transformation Office to guide staff teams to success. Virtua Health provides an excellent example of how to do this. 

2. Include Patient Representation – shift from doing something to the patient to partnering with the patient to incorporate their needs and priorities into the plan. Actual patient representation is best, but if this is not possible, assign someone in the meeting to represent the patient’s perspective. 

Add a deliberate step in your planning to discuss what the patient wants to know, not just what you want to tell them. If possible, have your staff step through the patient journey that you are working to impact. It can be sobering to see all the barriers that exist today and discourage patients from engaging – long wait times, confusing instructions, health literacy mismatches.

When sending instructions to a patient to prepare for a procedure, also include details on parking and appointment preparation. For example, if the appointment is for a wellness visit, provide an overview of the visit and offer the option for the patient to provide specific data before the visit. This reduces the time spent collecting data and gives the patient unrushed time to think about their answers.

3. Include Staff Representation – How your staff responds will make or break this effort. Patients will ask staff about communications that they receive or challenges that they are experiencing, and staff must be informed and able to discuss these communications. At a minimum, staff should be able to talk about (high-level) the reason outreach occurs and where to go with questions or feedback. This is where your marketing person collaborating with your trainer is invaluable.

Implementing proactive outreach will change the staff workflow. Staff need to be involved in planning for those changes before go live and have regular check-ins after go live to provide feedback on what is going well and what needs work.

4. Focus on the End Result - Patient engagement is not the goal but the means to achieve the goal. 

Be clear about the specific operational and clinical goals, including how you will measure them and how patient engagement will contribute to success. For example:

• What early indicators will show you if your program is succeeding? Will you see an increase in patients contacting your organization? What are your response rates? Are you seeing an increase in specific clinic or procedure patient counts and revenue to show that patients are responding to your outreach? Will EMR gap in care reports and alerts show changes or a reduction in no-shows?
• What supporting measures need to be tracked? If this is your first time conducting proactive digital outreach, you must monitor mobile phone and email rates and provide feedback to the staff who collect this data. 

It may not have mattered before if they captured a mobile or landline number in the designated fields, but it really matters now. Consider sponsoring a program with a catchy name (e.g., Digits for Better Health) that includes targets, visual progress measures, and incentives to collect usable patient mobile and email numbers.

• Incentive revenue is a lagging indicator that is important to track. Check in with Quality and Regulatory staff to see what changes their monitoring is showing.
• Measure patient feedback. Consider adding a post-visit patient satisfaction survey to gather feedback on the effectiveness of the changes you are implementing for patients.
• Measure staff feedback. In addition to discussing progress in staff meetings, consider a staff survey to get anonymous feedback.

5. Plan for both Staff-initiated and Patient-initiated Contact – It is natural to think about where digital outreach benefits the organization, such as reducing phone calls for population outreach. What about contacts that would be beneficial, but you never had the time to do in a pure face-to-face world? Would a periodic check-in with patients on medication adherence be helpful? You can easily do this with the same platform.

Consider how the patient may need to contact you and make that process convenient. Enabling patients to contact a clinic or post-acute care agency between visits is essential to reduce avoidable hospitalizations. Rather than calling the office and waiting on hold, you could have them contact you via your website or even create a refrigerator magnet with a QR code that they can use to initiate a secure text.

Digital outreach needs to support patient engagement, not add additional barriers. Avoid long wait times by using your contact center to get preventive appointments scheduled digitally. Include education in the outreach, capture data that speeds the conversation with the contact center agent and then add a call to action that enables the patient to transfer to a live agent and get the appointment scheduled. 

Think through how you will manage patient outreach after hours. For example, if you don’t have patient self-scheduling, you can trigger a form after hours to capture the best time to contact the patient the next business day. Who will follow up on these after-hours contacts?

6. Plan for and Proactively Address Data Quality Issues – if this is your first time digitally engaging patients, you will have mobile phone number and email address quality issues. Look at the patient journey for places where this data is collected. Educate staff responsible for capturing this data on how it will now be used and the importance of capturing accurate data in the defined fields in the EHR. 

Track data quality and review it regularly with staff. Consider incentives, competitions and/or set performance targets to improve data quality.

7. Communicate Your New Digital Capabilities to Patients – Patients need to know about your outreach program to build trust. In addition to educating staff, use your marketing department to help build patient awareness of the expanded outreach. 

Incorporate branding into your outreach. Use the patient's and their provider’s names in digital communications. Use your logo and brand colors in communication to build familiarity. Consider also using your patient engagement tools to educate your community about available services and the types of planned outreach.

Leverage your marketing department to capture and share patient stories of how your population health outreach impacted the life of a patient by catching a condition early.

8. Measure Baseline and Post-implementation Results and Optimize. Data is critical to determine current performance and identify areas for further improvement. Data quantifies the impact of the outreach, which will be needed to sustain support for the program and justify continued expansion.

Build active monitoring and optimization into your operations. Success requires an agile approach. Identify who will capture measures, who will review them, and how they will be shared with the staff and leadership, as well as the frequency of these updates. 

Once you are live, identify resources to: 

• Monitor and communicate results, monthly, throughout the organization
• Celebrate successes
• Review results with staff and solicit staff insight and suggestions to improve
• Monitor response rates for areas to improve

9. Select a Flexible Platform and Partner – Multiple point solutions create tremendous work for IT teams and create a disjointed experience for both staff and patients. Identify target uses initially and those expected in the future, and then look for a platform that can address them all, including:

9. Automated outreach to populations  
10. Bidirectional HIPAA-secure patient texting
11. Capture of patient data and e-signatures
12. Robust out-of-the-box reporting

Create a checklist to evaluate vendors that have expansive capabilities and self-serve tools.  Have them demonstrate how they can assist in addressing your priority needs.

Select a vendor who understands your goals and is committed to helping you achieve them. Look for no-code tools. Avoid vendors that require you to use them to make (and charge for) content or workflow changes.

You can do this. QliqSOFT can help. Contact us.