As people demand more personalized experiences from their healthcare companies and providers, patient engagement is increasingly emerging as a top priority. With increasing demands for digital-first interactions and more connected healthcare journeys from their patients and customers, healthcare organizations must evolve their communication strategies to meet these new expectations. In fact, more than ever, today’s healthcare patients and customer expect the same efficient and personalized experiences that they have with other businesses, including retail and financial services.

In this article, we explore two key strategies for improving patient and customer engagement: employing a multi-channel approach and personalization. We’ll show you how each concept improves your communication strategy, while ensuring HIPAA compliance at the same time.

The Growing Importance of Patient Engagement

Today’s healthcare industry is undergoing significant changes – some might even call it outright disruption. With new and varied services like Telehealth, Remote Care, In-Home Care, Connected Care, Value-Based Care, and more, clear and targeted communication has never been more vital for effectively improving patient engagement and driving greater levels of participation in an individual’s healthcare journey.

Another key thing to bear in mind is that today’s patients and customers already have increasing expectations for convenient, personalized, and secure interactions with their healthcare providers. According to a report from McKinsey & Company, over 70% of patients prioritize the ability to communicate with their healthcare providers, payers and suppliers through their preferred channels. However, these preferences vary significantly across age groups, highlighting the importance of a multi-channel communication strategy; let’s explore those preferences now.

Patient Engagement Preferences by Age Group

The chart below, compiled from recent research findings, highlights the varying communication channel preferences by age group, helping healthcare companies craft their engagement strategies accordingly:

By understanding these differences, healthcare organizations can implement and continually refine multi-channel marketing strategies that cater to the unique preferences of each demographic group. Key takeaways include:

• Baby Boomers (57 – 75 years old) still prefer phone calls (55%) and face-to-face interactions (60%), though there is preference in email (45%) for certain types of communication, such as appointment reminders and post-care instructions.
• Millennials (26 – 40 years old) tend to favor asynchronous methods that fit into their busy schedules, i.e., phone, text, and email. This age group is tech-savvy, with half also using patient portals for managing their healthcare options.
• As digital natives, Gen Z patients lean heavily toward digital channels, with text messaging (40%) and patient portals (30%) as top choices. They, more than any other group, expect fast, responsive communication, which makes secure, real-time digital options essential.

Catering to patients’ communication channel preferences ensures they feel better heard and, as a result, more valued. This will result in them becoming more involved in their healthcare journey, leading to higher rates of satisfaction, being more receptive to new services or products, and, most importantly, better health outcomes.

Multi-Channel Communication: Meeting Patients Where They Are

Healthcare providers, payers and suppliers need a multi-channel strategy, that incorporates email, text, patient portals, and phone calls to match the different communication preferences of their diverse patient and customer bases.

A single-channel, or siloed, approach is far less effective, as each demographic interacts with healthcare providers in unique ways. In light of this, offering communication options across multiple channels makes it easier to reach patients – and for them to participate in their healthcare journeys on their preferred terms.

Benefits of multi-channel communication include:

• Increased Engagement: Patients and customer are more likely to respond and engage through their preferred communication method, whether that’s by text, email, portal or over the phone.
• Improved Satisfaction: receiving timely, personalized updates makes patients feel more connected and satisfied with care.
• Better Adherence to Care Plans: patients who receive reminders or follow-ups through their preferred channels are more likely to adhere to care plans, attend appointments, and follow medical advice.
• Upselling and Cross-Selling Opportunities: when healthcare providers and suppliers connect with patients and customers over the channel of their choice they are more likely to reach their target audience and attract qualified prospects for new services and products, as well as upgrades to existing ones.

Take Personalization Further by Using PHI in Communications

After unprecedented numbers of people were forced to adapt to digital solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic, personalization is no longer optional or “a nice to have” – but an expectation among patients and customers. The healthcare industry is no exception to this with personalized communications greatly enhancing efficiency and driving favorable outcomes.

Securely harnessing protected health information (PHI) is critical to effective personalization across a broad range of use cases, including care management, marketing and preventative care. It’s important to appreciate, however, that personalization in healthcare engagement goes beyond merely addressing patients by their names; it includes tailoring messages, reminders, renewals, recommendations, and offers based on their medical history, treatment plans, personal characteristics (age, gender, etc.), and ongoing health needs.

Examples of PHI-driven personalization include:

• Appointment Reminders: personalized reminders based on the patient’s treatment plan can reduce no-show rates.
• Post-Procedure Follow-Ups: securely sending follow-up instructions and health updates specific to the patient’s condition leads to better adherence and recovery rates.
• Targeted Preventative Care Campaigns: using patient data to create campaigns around vaccinations, screenings, annual tests, or chronic disease management helps address individual health needs.
• Marketing campaigns: delivering targeted campaigns to highly segmented groups of patients and customers, e.g., offers for the latest in-home blood pressure monitor for patients suffering from hypertension.

However, using PHI in communications requires strict adherence to HIPAA regulations and a broad set of data security safeguards and best practices. LuxSci’s Secure Healthcare Communications Suite enables healthcare organizations to safely use PHI in digital communications, ensuring compliance for email, text, marketing and data collection forms, while providing all the required functionality for personalizing your communications to create the desired impact. 

Why Secure Healthcare Communication is Crucial

Data breaches in the healthcare industry are consistently on the rise, and, unfortunately, they show no signs of abating. In fact, between 2009 and 2023, healthcare data breaches resulted in the exposure of more than a half billion patient records.  Healthcare companies are prime targets for cyberattacks, because of the sensitivity of the data they possess and the critical importance of their services.

Consequently, the fines for healthcare companies that fail to sufficiently protect PHI and fall victim to data breaches can extend into the millions.  The reputation damage, however, can be far more costly, with it often being beyond repair.

LuxSci is the most experienced provider of HIPAA-compliant email and secure healthcare communication solutions, working with organizations of all sizes: from local and regional practices to large healthcare systems, providers and suppliers, including Athenahealth, Delta Dental, 1800 Contacts, and Rotech Healthcare.

Our comprehensive HIPAA-compliant communications platform includes:

• HIPAA-Compliant Email: send millions of secure emails every month with our Secure High Volume Email solution, or make your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 email HIPAA-compliant with our Secure Gateway Product
• Secure Text Messaging: reach patients quickly and securely with appointment reminders, health updates, and other communications via text. Connect them directly into their patient portals via their desktop or mobile device —with no application installation required.
• Secure Marketing: proactively connect with your customers with HIPAA-compliant email marketing campaigns for increased engagement, lead generation and sales.
• Secure Forms: safely collect, store, access and analyze PHI data from patients to optimize workflows and generate insights that allow you to refine your long-term strategies.

If you’d like to learn more about how to take your patient and customer engagement to the next level, all while remaining compliant with HIPAA regulations, contact us today!

As the healthcare industry grows increasingly competitive, personalized engagement has become a key differentiator for companies aiming to better connect with their patients and customers.

However, effective personalization requires more than loosely matching a patient to a product or service based on a handful of dubious demographic data points – or a message carefully crafted to assume familiarity. Instead, successful personalized patient engagement requires using data from your Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems, and Revenue Collection Platforms (RCPs) in combination with a secure communications solutions to target and tailor your messages like never before.

To help you get there, this post explores core strategies for leveraging PHI in patient engagement, as well as the benefits of integrating secure communications like HIPAA-compliant email with your CDPs, RCPs, and EHR systems. Whether you’re a healthcare provider, payer or supplier, these strategies will help you develop a data-driven approach to patient engagement that sets your brand apart, builds trust, and boosts customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Why Personalized Engagement Makes a Difference

Ultimately, personalized patient or customer engagement is vital because it strengthens relationships, fosters trust, and encourages proactive healthcare behaviors and decision-making. By taking the extra time to craft your communications to resonate with the recipient’s particular healthcare needs and pain points – and securely including it in our messages – makes your targets more likely to engage with you, now and in the future.  This results in an individual becoming a more active participant in their healthcare journey: engaging in more self-education, listening to advice (e.g., screening recommendations), adhering to treatments, trying new products, and, ultimately, enjoying better health outcomes overall. 

However, to reap these benefits, healthcare organizations must navigate the complexities of securely handling PHI and integrating it across communication systems and data platforms to facilitate personalized and HIPAA-compliant interactions.

Three Core Strategies for Personalized Engagement Across the Healthcare Journey

Let’s look at three essential engagement strategies that will help you achieve better results by leveraging PHI in your communications, including:

• Provider-Centric Strategies:

• Payer-Focused Strategies

• Supplier Strategies

1. Provider-Centric Strategies: Customized Patient Pathways

Here are a few examples of how healthcare providers can employ PHI-driven personalization to increase patient engagement, using the email channel:

• Reminders for Preventive Care: by segmenting patients by their risk factors and medical history, providers can send customized email reminders for preventative screenings, vaccinations, or check-ups.
• Post-Treatment Follow-ups: sending patients customized follow-ups after treatment or surgery improves adherence to prescribed care plans. Providers can automate reminders, follow-up surveys, or educational materials specific to the patient’s condition, increasing engagement, and overall awareness of their health journey, and, subsequently, health outcomes.
• Mental Health and Chronic Care Management: the management of both mental health and chronic disease conditions favor a high-touch, personalized approach. PHI-driven engagement enables healthcare providers to send the most appropriate regular check-ins, support resources, and reminders to reach a patient population that can fall through the cracks of outreach efforts.

2. Payer-Focused Strategies: Supporting Long-Term Health

Payers, such as health insurers, can leverage PHI for tailored member engagement that aligns with value-based care objectives, including:

• Engage Members Via Their Preferred Channels: sending people information through their preferred channels, such as email, text, or phone, greatly improves the chances that they receive it and act upon it. This better ensures they receive important details, such as policy details and benefits, that will assist them on their healthcare journey, leading to higher levels of satisfaction with their coverage and more business and renewals for your company. You can gain greater insight into this in our article on How to Improve Patient Engagement with Secure Communications.
• Strengthened Member Loyalty: the more that customer feel that their payer understands their unique health concerns and needs, the greater their sense of loyalty towards them. Personalized interactions increase trust and member or customer satisfaction, resulting in long-term relationships.
• Proactive Retention Strategies: by analyzing customer data, payers can identify those at risk of not renewing their healthcare coverage and implement targeted communications to retain them. Personalized outreach, such as email reminders about plan benefits or assistance with the renewal process, can effectively encourage members to continue their coverage.

3. Supplier Strategies: Enhancing Customer Support and Education

Healthcare suppliers, such as medical device manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies, can harness PHI to educate customers on the benefits of their products and services for upsell and cross-sell, in addition to offering exceptional support, training and aftercare following their purchase.

• Tailored Customer Education: with PHI, healthcare suppliers can provide condition-specific educational resources that will help customers better understand how their offerings support their health. In many cases, this will be much-welcomed information, resulting in increased brand awareness, trusted relationships, and, ultimately, better health outcomes.
• Personalized Adherence Programs: sending personalized reminders, or an offer of support, boosts the chances of compliance with medication or device usage instructions – both increasing their efficacy and reducing the risks that accompany their misuse. Additionally, automating emails for these follow-ups, as part of a comprehensive customer onboarding process, streamlines this process and ensures the most valuable customer experience.
• Equipment Renewals or Upgrades: proactively sending customers emails and messages on new or updated products and services can lead to increased conversions and sales, by simple virtue of the fact you’re telling your customer base about them. All customers who have seen improvements in their quality of life from your products or services will be interested to hear about improvements or additions to your offerings – so seize this prime opportunity to engage with them.

The Power of Data Integration

To maximize personalization, healthcare organizations can leverage PHI across the different systems within their IT ecosystems and create unified data profiles that drive better engagement. Integrating data from Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems, and Revenue Collection Platforms (RCPs), and securely using it in communications, such as email campaigns, is a critical component of meaningful engagement and increases your ability to reach your targets. Here’s how it helps:

• CDPs aggregate data from multiple channels to provide a comprehensive, centralized view of each patient or customer. By integrating PHI and other behavioral data in a CDP, healthcare organizations can better understand patient needs, preferences, and history, resulting in more precise, data-driven engagement.
• EHRs boast a wealth of patient data that can be used to personalize engagement down to an individual level. By securely integrating EHR data, healthcare providers can tailor communications to reflect each patient’s unique medical history and current care plan, making successful engagement far more likely.
• RCPs are essential for understanding the financial side of patient engagement. When combined with clinical and behavioral data, RCPs provide insights into a patient’s financial interactions with the healthcare system, allowing organizations to personalize payment reminders, financial assistance programs, and other revenue cycle communications. With this being one of the more contentious and stressful parts of the healthcare journey for many patients, securely communicating PHI as part of your RCP strategy can have a considerable positive impact on patient satisfaction, as well as reducing billing cycle times and their resulting admin.

By uniting data from these platforms, and other applications where critical data resides, healthcare organizations gain a comprehensive view of each patient, enabling highly-personalized interactions that improve outcomes and increase trust over time.

Safeguarding PHI: LuxSci Secure Healthcare Communications

As healthcare provider, payers and suppliers expand their use of PHI for more effective personalization, securing sensitive patient data becomes increasingly crucial. When employing the personalized engagement strategies detailed in this post, it’s essential to ensure all PHI is handled securely, if you don’t want to incur the consequences of falling out of HIPAA compliance.

LuxSci offers a suite of HIPAA-compliant, secure communication solutions designed to facilitate secure, personalized patient and customer engagement, while providing the necessary foundation to effectively use PHI in your emails. Our solutions enable healthcare organizations to optimize data integration from CDPs, EHRs, and RCPs to better personalize engagement and deliver better results. This includes:

• Secure Email: protects PHI with automated, flexible encryption options that exceed HIPAA compliance requirements. This allows for high-volume, personalized email outreach without compromising privacy.
• Secure Marketing: especially designed for HIPAA-compliant campaigns, LuxSci’s Secure Marketing solution boasts advanced email functionality including segmentation, automation, and deep email reporting tools, enabling impactful engagement at scale.
• Secure Text: connect with patients over mobile devices by enabling access to PHI and other sensitive information via regular SMS text messages – with no installation of new applications required.
• Secure Forms: LuxSci’s Secure Forms tool ensures that organizations can safely collect and process PHI, enabling seamless data capture for personalized engagement.

Interested in discovering how LuxSci’s secure healthcare communications services can help you leverage PHI for highly more personalized patient engagement?

Contact us to learn more about our products and pricing, and to schedule your free demo!