How to Improve Patient Experience (PX) With Automation

As a healthcare provider, you know that creating relationships with patients is an essential foundation for maintaining wellness. Between appointment and vaccine scheduling, prescription refills, communicating health risks with patients, and more, managing patient communications and keeping them engaged can be challenging. A strong communications strategy can take the complexity out of it so that you can keep patient wellness as a top priority.

What is Patient Experience (PX)?

Patient experience (PX) describes a patient’s holistic feeling about their healthcare journey. It encompasses both the care provided and the communication touchpoints reached along the way. Excellent patient care is always the primary objective, but ensuring patients feel heard, are admitted in a timely fashion, and have easy access to providers has been shown to improve overall patient outcomes.   

Core Components of a Positive Patient Experience

Accessibility and Convenience

Today, most consumers say they prefer to engage with companies through SMS. SMS is a simple but effective solution that can be easily integrated into existing communication workflows to send health reminders, set and confirm appointments, and obtain patient feedback. It’s also a great way to ensure patients stay updated with their medications. Patients can get text alerts to refill prescriptions on-demand through prescription management or electronic medical record systems integrations.

Automating communication eliminates the manual process of looking up and contacting patients who need an appointment. In addition, these systems can identify and record the patient’s preferred method of communication – whether it be text or phone calls.

From there, the patient automatically receives communications to set appointments, reminders for upcoming appointments, and, if needed, the flexibility to reschedule appointments. If the patient doesn’t respond or complete the scheduling process, a communication workflow trigger can be set to automate a follow-up on a different time and day.

Communication and Empathy

More than ever, patients expect humanized treatment in every stage of their journey, from pre-admission to post-discharge. Today, AI agents leverage sentiment analysis to consistently provide a human touch and deliver the human-like interactions patients crave while improving the accuracy of the information provided to patients and caregivers.

Quality of Care

The cornerstone of healthcare is healing and saving lives. A good outcome is, by far, the most critical aspect of a positive patient experience. Developing an efficient workflow throughout the day, structuring your team with great people, and providing accurate diagnoses are all key elements of excellent patient care. 

Strategies for Improving Patient Experience with Automation

Patient-Centered Care

Great patient experiences start with great first impressions. Patient issues can be addressed quicker and easier than ever by providing self-service options. Gone are the days of patients calling in, sitting on hold, explaining their situation, and waiting to be helped. With automated processes and chatbots, patients can take care of routine tasks such as bill payment, appointment scheduling, vaccine scheduling, and learning provider information.

Technology and Innovation

Healthcare IT solutions are shifting how we think about healthcare, from managing appointments to communicating with doctors and healthcare facilities to refilling prescriptions. Similar automation technologies are already used in the business-to-consumer sector. Today’s patients expect the same timely communications they receive from big-name companies like Amazon and United Airlines from their medical providers.

Automation lowers workers’ need for manual input, so providers can be confident that they are always working with the right information. This is especially important in the healthcare industry, given the nature of the patient data and the need to support healthcare regulations for the organization. The capacity for mistakes in judgment or data collection is much smaller using these digital tools. 

Staff Training and Development

The complexity of new patient paperwork, consent forms, insurance verifications, and the collection and processing of information could be more manageable for patients and staff alike. Communications automation with AI streamlines the process, automatically serving paperwork to patients before their appointment, allowing time to complete it on their own time. Once submitted, the automation solution processes the paperwork, updating patient records, and alerting staff to missing details. Patients and medical staff can initiate treatment faster while focusing on what is essential.

Measuring and Monitoring Patient Experience

AI in healthcare CX allows providers to improve patient care by leveraging data, insights, and analytics. Interaction data can be added to patient records to improve healthcare, help to predict future patient needs, and even improve patient experience. Every interaction is an excellent opportunity to collect critical information, identify improvement opportunities, and advance patient care.

In today’s digital landscape, patients communicate with several healthcare providers across locations. Tools like IntelePeer’s SmartOffice allow organizations with multiple or regional offices to manage communications across locations. 

Conclusion

AI-driven customer experience in healthcare enhances efficiency and improves patient outcomes. Contact us to learn how our CX solutions can streamline appointment scheduling, patient engagement, follow-up care, and information management to optimize the patient experience.