Overcome the Obstacles of Patient Messaging

Key Takeaways

• Patients prefer text messaging and live chat over phone calls, and messages should be thoughtfully crafted to keep them engaged and informed.
• A solid communication strategy means your office operates more effectively and patients are more informed, resulting in better outcomes.
• Custom content, value-driven and informative messages, and the right tools will help you communicate with patients effectively.

In the post-pandemic digital era, the “new normal” level of communication looks very different. Now, patients expect personalized content, user-friendly and secure digital messaging, and easy access to relevant information.

Practices have to embrace digital services to communicate effectively and provide patients with a better experience. With a solid communication strategy in place, your practice will have well-rounded messaging and deliver the right information to the right patients in the right way.

The most effective way to reach your patients is through custom messages, including text and video. However, many practices aren’t leveraging these messages properly.

The most common obstacles in patient messaging include:

• Compliance—You and your staff are responsible for protecting the privacy of your patients’ health information. Every interaction must be HIPAA compliant.
• Time management—If your staff is manually typing out every message, this is a waste of time and resources.
• Repetition—Sending messages with little variation in the content makes for a stale experience.
  Engagement—If patients aren’t engaged with your messages, they retain less information, remain disengaged throughout treatment, and have a poorer relationship with their provider.
• Risk of poor outcomes—When patients are less informed, the risk of medical complications rises. If information falls through the cracks with staff, there could be delays in care, incorrect information given, or poor documentation of a patient’s health records.
• Mixed messages—Staff members having a bad day could mean your messaging isn’t delivered as intended.
• Staff turnover—If you have a high turnover rate, your team constantly has to spend time retraining someone and making sure you’re delivering the right message.

Consistently falling short with the way your practice communicates fuels a system of dissatisfaction, which puts your business’ reputation and your patients’ care at risk.

What Does Good Patient Engagement Look Like?

Your patients will only have a superior experience if they’re engaged. In addition to communicating through text, incorporating video messages into your strategy will take engagement to another level. According to Insivia, viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it on video compared to 10% when reading it in text. (We’ll cover more on video engagement in our next blog. The data is mind-blowing!)

Combine the power of custom texts with video messages and your patients will be more engaged, more informed, and have a better overall experience.

True patient engagement looks something like this:

• Patients easily find your practice and schedule appointments. From the start, they can get in touch with your office quickly and efficiently, and it’s clear how to do so.
• The communication and content you provide are relevant and worth interacting with. Patients get messages such as instructions, details about their procedure, ways to leave a review, and more, all timed perfectly with where they’re at in their care journey.
• At the consultation, you already know what they want more information about, so you can cater the appointment to their unique needs. Personalizing the consultation will lead to a better patient-provider relationship and increase the likelihood of them saying yes to treatment.
• Patients feel more informed going into the consultation. They feel more confident about treatment and their decision to choose you as a provider.

To measure the way patients engage and better customize their care, WUWTA organizes data from all of your messages into one easy-to-use platform. Your team can see when patients leave feedback, interact with messages, stop watching videos, and more. Knowing how patients engage with your content will tell you how to make it even better!

4 Key Strategies for Effective Patient Messaging

Overcoming the obstacles of patient messaging will improve the way you communicate and ultimately result in your patients receiving better care. Here are four strategies to incorporate into your messaging strategy:

Customize Your Content

Patients want to hear about what’s relevant to their care. Personalize the messages you send to include information about their treatment, and remember that details matter. Something as small as including their name will help patients feel you’re talking directly to them. With WUWTA, your staff can modify templates or send custom messages to tailor the content to every patient’s specific treatment journey.

Make Every Message Count

Every message should deliver something of value and/or have a clear call to action. Patients will get bored with repetitive messages. Keep them engaged with concise content that clearly outlines the point you want to get across. Your system should track the way patients engage and provide useful data that tells you how to improve your messaging, which is a feature woven into WUWTA’s strategy.

Help Your Patients Feel Prepared

Patients who are informed and engaged feel more confident about their care and achieve better outcomes. Go beyond appointment text reminders and educate patients about their condition and what they can expect during their treatment journey. Our platform allows you to send helpful messages at every touchpoint of your patients’ care, including text and video, to make sure they have the information they need.

Have a System in Place

With the right communication system, your staff can easily send custom messages and measure patient engagement. This optimizes more of your staff’s time every day, so they can spend less time making phone calls and more time contributing to a top-notch patient experience in the office. With just the click of a button, your staff can send patients the right information at the right time, every time.

Enhance Your Communication Strategy, Provide Better Care

WUWTA is your all-in-one solution to enhancing patient communication that does all of this and more. With an advanced platform in place, your staff saves time and your patients are more engaged throughout treatment, resulting in a higher level of care.

Request a 30-minute presentation to experience the power of WUWTA.