Increase Patient Engagement

If you want to know how to increase patient engagement, you’ve got to understand how to improve patient engagement in healthcare. Reduced to its simplest point, the question is what do patients want or need? 

From this you can evaluate current patient engagement avenues to see what patients have available, what they don’t, and what they’re opting to engage with. This then leads into assessment: if patients aren’t using an engagement opportunity in place, why aren’t they?  

We can break down a fictitious questionnaire as an example: 

• How many people opened the questionnaire? 
• How many people answered the questionnaire? 
• Is the questionnaire too long winded?
• Is it difficult to read (font size, style, colour, background etc)
• Was it sent as a text message and only opens on mobile when they’d rather sit at a desk and open it in a browser window?  

There’s lots of little insights and queries like this that add up to a bigger issue for a healthcare provider to tackle. Regardless of these details though, two goals that are always appropriate for improving patient care are to offer more education – or opportunities to access resources – and to work on bettering the clinical culture.  

Work smarter, not harder: 

Technology is a huge accomplice in the quest to improve modern healthcare. We’ve got many articles about digital solutions leading to better care – including one on patient engagement software - and we sell many of those solutions, but it’s explicitly the computing side we’re interested in here. 

Software has the capacity to extract data from its use. This data can then be analysed to establish statistics and trends. Healthcare solutions can track anonymous user data of peak traffic, the times of use, and which specific areas of the program get the most use. For emails – the common approach for patient surveys – you can also assess the open rate of the email, the click through rate (CTR), as well as how many just straight up delete the email or even report it as spam. 

Knowing how best to approach the patient is crucial, but it takes time. Mistakes will be made. It’s on the healthcare provider to appreciate this and to continue anyway, striving to correct its approach based on the evidence and learning. As these initial stumbling blocks are overcome, then you can delve into the good stuff: demographics and psychographics.

Demographics: These are the core structures or groupings within a population, as listed below:

Psychographics: These are structures or groupings based on individual traits, including:

With these insights you’ll be able to produce targeted patient engagement; perhaps at the individual level but certainly at a specific group that feels far more personalised than a general approach of hitting anyone and everyone with the same GP surgery newsletter, or the same vaccination invite regardless of eligibility. Personalisation shows commitment to the individual, which builds rapport, trust, and ultimately encourages greater engagement.

There are many factors affecting patient engagement. These barriers can be neatly split into two sides: the patient and the clinician.  

When exploring patient engagement challenges, it’s important to take a patient-centred approach. They are client, consumer and dependent all in one. They are in need of help and vulnerable to the world around them, but the problem is getting them involved. This patient activation is very achievable, but the patient has got to want to engage. This isn’t always the case. Demographics helps us see where engagement is low and if that correlates with things such as: 

• Lacking education (do they know how to engage? Or what they’re engaging with?) 
• Cultural behaviours (clinicians are wholly trusted and not challenged) 
• Motivation (what incentive do they have to interact?) 
• Incapable of engagement (due to a restrictive disability, for example)
• Personality issues (shy, embarrassed, lazy)
• Unaware of the opportunity 

This is why healthcare organisations have to take patient engagement seriously. There’s a lot of work to be done to get the high value demographic and psychographic data needed to help tailor their services. The data is available through patients to benefit patients, even if they don’t realise it. 

The challenges of patient engagement can’t neglect clinicians either though. It’s no secret that – in the UK at least – there’s a shortage of doctors and nurses. Healthcare professionals are working longer and treating more people. Improving care is an ever-present goal, but do the clinicians have the capacity to be more engaged with patients? 

• Are clinicians trained enough to know how to use engagement tools?
• Are clinicians comfortable enough socially to engage personally/face-to-face?
• Do clinicians have enough time to accommodate this extra work?
• What incentives do they have to engage more? (paid overtime, work covered whilst on engagement tasks)
• What if the patient isn’t compliant/engaging?

The time part is probably the biggest barrier to patient engagement listed above in the clinician section. In a segment taken from Fierce Healthcare, they state that “Better patient engagement takes time and effort on the part of physicians and staff—and a new report suggests most organizations don't account for that when they design programs.” 

This is a big problem, and a hindrance to any and all patient engagement. There are time-friendly options to get started with but time and effort is the cost to generate better outcomes.

Thus we conclude with the ideas for how to improve patient engagement. Patient activation is, again, a phrase that is key within this process. If the patient is actively involved in the care process then healthcare professionals can move on to the next step: how to improve patient engagement in their own healthcare. 

This isn’t a difficult challenge, and initiatives can easily be identified. Patient engagement strategies should revolve around simple solutions like: 

• Multiple choices of language for touch screens in clinical waiting rooms
• Healthy eating programmes
• Local partnerships between a trust and a gym
• Patient portals for personal care management; browser or app based and for appointments, prescriptions, tests, and other community health services
• Video calls for a more personal, remote contact
• Educational resources (web based or pamphlet)
• Automated email/text contact for visit feedback
• Automated emails/texts for appointments and prescriptions
• Social media or email updates (e.g. vaccination opportunities, screening clinics etc)

The key is variety, but where appropriate. Patients and clinicians alike need to engage, but healthcare organisations need to facilitate this - before and after patient appointments. Patients can and will become tired of having to use multiple systems to engage. A central solution, like the NHS app or the GP patient portal is great for simplifying the process and reducing confusion. Fear of tech and frustration at not understanding is a huge problem that puts people of all ages off from tasks. 

It’s all well and good having patient engagement best practices, but you have to know how to get patients engaged, and you won’t know that without an overarching organisation getting the ball rolling and making first contact. Providers can’t wait for a one-fits-all solution, or the hope that AI will solve all of our problems. It won’t. Instead it’s people – clinicians and digital tools – that will help people and increase patient engagement.