How Omnichannel Communication Enhances Patient Experience

Before a patient enters your healthcare organization or books an appointment, you provide them an experience.

This experience is built across multiple channels.

Their experience could be good.

It could be bad.

How customers experience your business is in your hands.

But how does the experience start before they take your services?

Patients visit your website, use live chats, call your contact center, research you online, etc.

The experience they develop across all of these channels determines whether or not they choose to do business with you.

You either lead them… or you lose them.

This is why a clear omnichannel communication strategy is so important. Patient experience using omnichannel communications is a sum of all the experiences patients have while interacting with healthcare providers across their multiple communication platforms – when done well, the patient experiences a seamless journey, free of disruption.

Omnichannel communication augments and facilitates many business functions in healthcare organizations.

Impact of Omnichannel Communication Technology on Healthcare Businesses

Seamless Healthcare Communication

Being able to communicate with healthcare providers plays a vital role in determining patient experience. Omnichannel communication provides your customers with a seamless, efficient, and engaging dynamic for conversation.

Omnichannel communication helps you and patients communicate 24*7.

Being able to communicate on multiple platforms enables users to connect with your business via their preferred communication channel and switch to a different mode when needed.

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In this entire process, they always feel as though they have the same experience.

Because the communication data through various channels is stored in a single space, it is easily accessible – customers don’t have to wait and service agents always have the right information.

It also enables you to customize communication for patients thus, adding a personal touch that creates more engagement.

Your business can also generate Electronic Health Records (EHR) and share them with patients.

In addition, it also enables you to monitor their upcoming appointments and follow up.

The Online Omnichannel communication will also helps when providing online consultations to patients. This ability to provide clinical support to patients in the comfort of their homes enhances the patient experience and provides .

Patient Engagement and loyalty-

As communication enhances so does patient engagement and loyalty.

Patient engagement is the active involvement of patients when gathering information and making decisions about their symptoms, illnesses, and treatment options.

Enhancing Patient Engagement Through Omnichannel Communication in Healthcare

Omnichannel communication helps increase this engagement at every step of the patient journey.

Related Read: How AI-powered Chatbots Enhance Customer Engagement in Salesforce

How?

It initiates interactive communication between you and your patients through multiple modes of communication such as E-Mails, SMS, Contact Centers, etc.

It integrates the data making the availability of documents like prescriptions, and diagnostic results at the tip of your patients’ fingers. They can access them whenever needed and thus, feel more engaged with you.

Empowering Patients: Omnichannel Healthcare Communication

Patients want to be a part of their healthcare decisions and be more informed about their treatment.

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Omnichannel helps achieve that.

How?

• Personalization- Omnichannel communication helps healthcare providers predict the nature of communication, based on previous interactions with patients
• Transparency- All the clinical data is shared between both parties and is accessible at any given time.
• Reduced stress- Patients are often eager for responses when they try to connect with healthcare providers because they are in distress. Responses through Omnichannel Communication are real-time and thus reduce stress in patients. Result? They feel more engaged and loyal to your organization.
• Increased patient education- Real-time omnichannel communication educates patients about their rights making them feel empowered.

Real-time omnichannel communication, thus, ensures that your patients feel more engaged and more powerful, which ultimately leads to higher patient loyalty.

Efficient Healthcare Data Management

Omnichannel Communication helps healthcare providers manage patient data in a highly organized manner. It helps to document their health records, conversation, and all relevant data in a single space.

This lets your business reduce the workload of employees and make data more accessible.

The data is stored automatically, reducing the margin of error associated with manual entry. The collection of this data also helps healthcare providers analyze trends and patterns, and strategize based on their results.

Omnichannel communication increases patient experience exponentially by making communication more efficient, effective, and seamless.

It results in the right care environment for the patients based on their needs and behaviors through technology thus, increasing engagement, personalization, enhancing the experience, and ultimately loyalty.

According to a survey report by McKinsey, consumer adoption of digital healthcare has increased from 11% in 2019 to about 40% in 2021.

Why is Digital Accessibility Crucial for Omnichannel Patient Engagement in Healthcare?

What does this imply?

It implies that you need to be digitally available for your patients before it’s too late.

Omnichannel communication strategy will not only help you enhance your patient experience but also help reduce the workload of your employees, which will enable them to provide better service and increase their efficiency.

Patient experience plays a major role in the success or failure of a healthcare organization. You need a good omnichannel strategy in place to enhance your patient experience in the current market.

Read Our Success Story: Custom Integration in Patient Referral Support

If you want to know how to implement a successful omnichannel strategy, join our webinar, Improve Patient Care with Real-Time Omnichannel Communications and learn best practices from experts in the healthcare technology space.

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