How do you drive meaningful patient engagement?
Not only is patient engagement critical to the well-being of your patients, but it’s also a key driver in the long term success of your organization. If you have been neglecting this important component of healthcare and business, it’s time to reexamine your approach.
But before you jump in too deeply, you also need to consider the risks involved in certain patient engagement strategies, as well as how you can mitigate them. Through careful planning and the right tools, you can drive patient engagement without endangering patient data or putting your organization at risk. Ultimately, this allows you to safely boost patient outcomes while pushing your business forward.
What Is Patient Engagement?
Healthcare isn’t limited to what happens between a patient and their doctors, or between patients and other healthcare providers. While these encounters can be seen as patient engagement, there are a host of other opportunities to engage patients about their health, all opened up by the growth of healthcare technology.
The likes of health portals and secure emails can be used to regularly engage patients in important aspects of their healthcare, driving them toward better health outcomes. These mediums can be used to more effectively communicate with and inform patients, and can also help to involve them more actively in their own healthcare.
These technologies can be used to remind patients to build healthy habits, inform them of new research and treatment options, and to encourage them to book regular checkups and scans. Not only has this type of patient engagement been shown to improve the health of patients, but it also gives healthcare organizations opportunities to provide more proactive care, which can help to facilitate the long term success of their businesses.
Using Your Data to Drive Patient Engagement
If you want to make the most of your patient engagement strategy, it makes little sense to send out the same messages to everyone. If you send out messages encouraging frequent mammograms to men, or diet tips to patients suffering from anorexia, you aren’t going to get the results you are looking for.
At best, these interactions may annoy your patients. At worst, the wrong information could end up harming them. Such a strategy would be a far cry from your intention of helping them achieve better outcomes.
Instead of blanketing all of your patients with health information, reminders, and engagement they have no need for, a much better option is to leverage your organization’s electronic protected health information (ePHI). With this information, you can directly target your patients with information that is relevant to them and their condition. This can help them achieve better results and encourage them to come in for the treatment they really need.
You can use patient ePHI to target the right people with information about what programs are available to them, their treatment options, new case studies, and any special events. You can also notify them of any risks they may face, or symptoms that they should watch out for. Sending them relevant information and notifications will help to engage them with your firm in a much more positive manner.
Ultimately, using this tactic should not only boost your organization’s bottom line, but increase patient satisfaction and overall health.
The Risks of Using ePHI to Drive Patient Engagement
While your organization’s ePHI presents a great opportunity for driving engagement, it isn’t without its risks. ePHI is regulated by HIPAA legislation, and it must be used in compliance with these laws. If you send ePHI in an insecure manner, it’s a HIPAA violation, each instance of which can not only violate a patient’s privacy, but cost your organization large sums of money and cause a range of other headaches.
You may think that you can devise a patient engagement strategy that doesn’t involve sending out ePHI, but it only takes one employee mistake to land your company in a lot of trouble. These mistakes are also tremendously easy to make—something as simple as emailing an unencrypted newsletter about depression to patients who suffer from the condition could put your organization on the wrong side of the law.
A much better solution for driving patient engagement without the risk is to use HIPAA-compliant email marketing software.
A Secure and Compliant Solution for Driving Patient Engagement
LuxSci’s Secure Marketing is one of the only HIPAA-compliant email marketing services available. This makes it the perfect option for those in the health industry who want all the advantages of enhanced patient engagement, without taking on the major risks.
It’s designed specifically for HIPAA compliance, replete with all of the features you would normally expect in an email marketing solution, and uniquely scalable both in terms of email volume (to tens or hundreds of millions of messages per month) and in degree of security (all solutions are dedicated; however, beyond that we can tailor the degree of security and reliability to your specific needs). To find out more about how our Secure Marketing tool can help you drive patient engagement and see a great ROI, contact our team now.
