Five Ways To Optimize Patient Communications To Optimize Outcomes

Toward better patient communications

Hello, my name is Stephanie Wilson vice president of Vanguard Communications a marketing consulting group that has specialized in healthcare for 27 years. I’m joined today by my colleague Selene Neuburg client services director at Vanguard.

Today we’ll be covering five ways to optimize patient communications, a critical driver in optimizing treatment outcomes. This session highlights opportunities many practices have to better educate and communicate with patients to increase appointment and treatment compliance and therefore treatment success. We’ll be offering practical ideas in key areas of patient communication including online, on the phone and inside your practice.

Patient accessibility to your practice

Let’s first talk about patient accessibility to your practice, using IVF (in vitro fertilization) as an example. To optimize chances of conception, a patient needs to complete all the core milestones of IVF treatment. There are many steps and frequently many questions that if unanswered could delay or disrupt treatment. Giving easy access to the right providers and staff enables the patient to ask timely questions, discuss concerns and clarify steps or details required to treatment protocols.

Too often patients will feel frustrated by how difficult it is to get in touch with their care team or leave an appointment without a clear method of getting in touch. This can discourage the patient from getting the information she needs to complete treatment in between appointments.

For example we handled a negative review for an IVF clinic from a patient who wasn’t sure when to take her ovulation trigger shot. She had tried to call the practice and also emailed through the patient portal but didn’t hear back until after her window for taking the medication had closed as a next step in treatment and had to start the medication protocol over incurring extra expense and delays in pregnancy.

Prior to end of appointment patient communication

Here are some tips for optimizing communication accessibility before the patient leaves the appointment.

• Provide clear instructions on how to contact the practice; often a paper handout can help the patient remember.
• Provide multiple channels of communication such as online contact forms, an easy phone tree that connects to a real person not a voicemail, and an online patient portal ensure that proper staff members are regularly monitoring and actively responding to patients who reach out.
• Make sure there are no dead ends on these channels, and instruct the staff how to prioritize time-sensitive questions.

We recommend blocking time to return patient communication at least three times a day such as morning, lunch and at least an hour before the clinic closes. We also recommend having a staff person and nurse available to answer the phone during lunchtime. This may be the only time during business hours a patient can connect with the practice to ask time-sensitive questions.

Appointment reminders reduce no-shows

Appointment reminders are a great tactic you can use to help your patients optimize their IVF journeys. As we’ve mentioned, IVF is a complex process with many milestones. One major obstacle to patient success is also one of the simplest parts: Making sure your patient attends their appointments.

Your patients are likely under a lot of stress, which can contribute to them missing their appointments, forgetting key information about their appointments, or making mistakes while entering their appointment information into their calendars. Offering appointment reminders will help your patient not only keep track of their appointments but also be better prepared for their visit.

4 tips on appointment reminders

You can utilize different types of appointment reminders including text message, phone calls or secure emails. Here are four tips for effective appointment reminders.

• Test your reminder system regularly to ensure the information functionality and timing are all working appropriately.
• Make sure the messages will be helpful to your patients. Does the reminder include your practice name and address? Does it include the date and time of the appointment?
• Effective reminders can also include key appointment facts, like whether a patient should arrive with a full bladder or wearing loose clothing. Too often a practice will send a reminder like this with very little information. If the patient has another doctor’s appointment, it’ll be difficult to decipher. Frequency matters: Often multiple appointment reminders can be more effective than just one. Consider sending a reminder a few days before the appointment as well as 24 hours before the appointment. Multiple channels of communication can also increase the effectiveness of patient reminders such as using a text message, a secure email and a phone call. If your system is more customizable, you can use your patient’s preferred method of communication to send the reminders. So if your patient prefers reminders via text message, send their reminders via text.
• Don’t just remind, confirm. If you’re using an appointment reminder system that allows patients to confirm their appointments, make sure they’ve confirmed. If you have a patient who hasn’t responded to a reminder, call them and either confirm or reschedule their appointment. Decreasing the number of patients who no-show for their appointments will optimize your clinical schedule and your patients’ outcomes.

Good patient communication means answering questions

Answering patient questions and discussing concerns is another key to optimizing patient outcomes. During the course of treatment, there’s a lot to process and patient anxiety can be high. Sometimes patients don’t know what they don’t know and may not have a firm understanding of their condition treatment protocols or what they should do to prepare for an appointment. Other patients might have questions but hesitate to ask because they don’t feel comfortable or might even be afraid their question is foolish.

Physicians and care teams can help by proactively inviting questions, which gives you the opportunity to fill in information gaps, clarify key details and, most importantly, identify any problem areas that might hinder the treatment plan. A patient’s comfort and understanding with a prescribed plan can make or break treatment success.

So ask questions that will help indicate to you whether or not your patient understands:

• What to expect.
• What’s normal after a procedure.
• Knows how to identify concerning side effects and when to call the practice.
• Is comfortable with medication protocols.
• And can follow recovery instructions.

How to promote patient questions

Here are some tips for creating opportunities for patients to ask questions. In the exam room before the appointment ends ask these final prompt questions.

• Do you have any questions for me?
• Can I clarify anything?
• Do you have any concerns we can discuss?

This gives patients an opening to address any lingering information gaps and address hesitancies that might hinder treatment compliance. Next instruct your staff at checkout to ask “Did we answer all of your questions today?”

This second invitation can catch questions the patients may think of after the physician has already left the room. Have a designated representative call the patient a day or two after the appointment. This can help patients who might hesitate to call the practice on their own and can be especially useful if the patient has just had a procedure.

Plus, proactively reaching out to the patient creates a much stronger physician patient relationship. And this too can lead to better treatment outcomes. Providing your patients with educational health content is another way to optimize communication and conception. Examples of educational materials include health condition pages or blogs on your website, videos and paper handouts given during appointments.

Provide medical education content

Patient educational content should give patients insight into their cause of infertility treatment options and what to expect during treatment evaluation. Educational materials can also answer frequently asked patient questions.

The better informed a patient is about these topics, the more confident she will be with the process. A self-assured and informed patient will be able to better follow the process, knows it’s okay to ask questions, and better yet, will know when to reach out to the practice for support.

Here are three tips for using educational materials to optimize conception.

• First make sure you have a website and then make sure you use it it’s better to have a website with specialty-specific educational content that actually provides information to your patients as opposed to a flashy site with no substance.
• When writing content make sure it’s patient friendly, meaning avoid overly clinical terms and medical jargon. Instead focus on clarity, use simple terms that everyone can understand and include enough detail to cover the topic adequately.
• If looking for content ideas, consider supplementing written health content pages with informational videos and written blogs to answer frequently asked questions. Provide your expert insights or opinion and explain about relative or breaking news topics.

Using social media and email in patient communications

Social media and email represent powerful patient-communication opportunities to deliver and share health information, practice reminders and build relationships to optimize the treatment journey. Social media includes platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram, Tik Tok and YouTube.

Email newsletters can be sent through services like Mailchimp, Constant Contact and HubSpot. These are ideal communication channels where patients have opted in to hear from your practice and therefore anticipate and expect information. Distributing info on these easy-to-access channels can ultimately lead to better treatment outcomes by engaging and teaching patients while building affinity for the practice and doctors resulting in greater trust.

When it comes to treatment recommendations, social media and email newsletters are great methods for delivering the optimized patient education and affinity building we’ve been discussing. These channels offer additional methods to contact the practice, make the practice health info and general appointment details more accessible, and provide another avenue to address common patient questions.

Social media and email tips

Here are some tips for using social media and email.

• To engage with patients online, make sure you have an active social media and email manager to engage with patients who post comments or send email replies.
• Like or comment back and send thank-you messages and answer general questions, but be careful to protect patient privacy and don’t reveal or confirm any personal health info or provide specific medical advice on social media.
• Post at least once per week.
• When sending email newsletters, try a bimonthly or quarterly schedule so it’s consistent but not too frequent.
• And when it comes to sharing content, keep the content you share short and concise. To quote Shakespeare, ”Brevity is the soul of wit.”

Takeaways on patient communications

We covered five ways to optimize patient communications a critical driver in optimizing treatment outcomes. Here are the top takeaways to remember to optimize your patient success.

• Actively monitor all communication channels offered by your practice and ensure timely responses to patient inquiries.
• Have an appointment reminder system that you test regularly.
• Proactively invite your patients to ask questions at multiple touch points.
• Provide educational content in your practice and online through your website.
• Designate someone at your practice to appropriately respond to inquiries made via social media.

These are just some of the ways you can optimize patient communications to improve patient success during their IVF journeys. We hope you found this presentation valuable. Thank you for your time.