Are you struggling with the healthcare gaps and your patients are falling behind in preventive care and follow-up? You must have appropriate assets and enough amount of time to resolve these issues. The care prioritization and social distance practice from over the past decades in conjunction with the pandemic have slowed down the procedure of screenings and routine care.
According to the Patient Engagement HITs, care gaps are leading to more invasive and costly treatment down the line and resulting in delayed or missed diagnoses. Without the intervention of the right strategies, it will increase the likelihood of poor health outcomes. Healthcare organizations often have to use certain methodologies to close the care gaps and improve patient outcomes or quality scores.
Contrary to this, individuals are more likely to experience negative health outcomes when there are gaps in care, and ultimately with negative health issues, it may result in increased costs for healthcare providers, lower satisfaction scores, and readmission.
The healthcare systems will ease back to normal if patients are returned to care sooner. This will surely improve the outcomes and quell a sudden wave of hospitalizations for newly diagnosed conditions. When the postponed care impacts those practices that are battling with the surge of post-pandemic.
Disparity
Disparities arise in medical practices that refer to gaps in medical care when comparing various populations that fall along socioeconomic, ethnic, and racial lines. Healthcare professionals must take action to reduce inequality and transform this into quality for all. Different communities are not benefitting from the high quality of healthcare that is available despite the expanded health insurance coverage.
Healthcare professionals can improve the quality of care, optimize their outreach to begin the journey of revenue recovery, and enhance patient volume in the following ways;
Crucial Gaps
Every specialty is experiencing revenue loss as millions of the population of the US has postponed care. It is wise to focus on services like vaccinations, health screenings, etc, for healthcare organizations to kick start for gaining maximum reimbursements. Practices can reach their target audiences without exhausting outreach funds by focusing on the familiar care services for instance those which can increase their engagement efforts significantly.
To tailor outreach efforts around the patients’ particular needs, hospitals must identify the patients’ personas. In this way, you can figure out which patients are at risk for a particular condition or which are seeking out preventive care. With the help of additional data points derived from predictive analysis, a combination of patients’ data, and social determinants of health insights.
Practices must assure their outreach is limited to those patients they want to engage. In addition, these insights will help you identify which channels and type of message people are most receptive to. The more the patient will engage with the outreach the more providers will engage with patients over their preferred channel.
Leverage Multichannel Outreach
You can reinforce critical messaging by increasing frequency and patient reach with the help of multi-channel communications. ‘’It can outperform dual- or single-channel campaigns by 300% by integrating four or more digital channels’’, reported by Analyst firm Gartner. Putting it simply, the more patients you approach the more possibilities would be there to engage them.
So, the likelihood of motivating patients to take action will increase when you utilize multiple channels for this purpose. A few examples of engagement channels are mail, automated voice, text, and direct mail, etc. Ranging from the direct mailer tangibility to a searchable email each of these has a contradictive appeal for different patients.
Moreover, a range of uses like text messages for pre-appointment guidelines, a postcard reminder to schedule, an automated voice call, etc, fall under the category of multiple-channel outreach. Employing each of these channels will enable the hospitals to see significant results. In addition to this, utilizing data to figure out which channel best resonates with each patient will help you bridge the gap between patient care and patient volume.
Conduct Health Risk Assessments
To gauge patients’ health priorities and needs it is crucial to have a health risk assessment. This aggregated data is beneficial for personalized recommendations. These questionnaires will be helpful to engage patients. Providers can witness a notable rise in the initiatives’ success since the data collected comes directly from a patient.
With predicted data modeling, health risk assessments can be prompted to the patients. Thus bolstering the database’s ROI to find out those patients who are most likely to fill it out. These are a valuable intermediary to learn about patients’ health concerns and in a safe manner given that not everyone is comfortable returning to in-person visits in the clinical setting.
Before the pandemic is not going to work now the way that hospitals marketed themselves. It has changed the patients’ expectations and needs. Especially when it comes to closing critical care gaps, many health systems or hospitals have embraced the high-touch world to be successful in the future. Traditional strategies aren’t going to cut it and patients want to hear from them.
Besides, when you use multiple channels for more touchpoints and utilize data to find those patients that are probably close to a care gap. This will help you to grow your bottom line and improve health outcomes while driving maximum patient engagement. A further detailed explanation of the tech advancement is given below.
Digital Care Solutions
Digital advancement is necessary to close the gaps in care and enable healthcare providers to overcome all the obstacles that are influencing patients’ satisfaction. Those who will struggle to survive, not meet the quality thresholds, miss incentive dollars will fail to strategically focus on the right innovations. Patients will have a more proactive posture in managing their health and they will lose out when they will not take full advantage of the services.
However, as technology is rising to meet the challenges there are many solutions available though. Particularly, advanced tech solutions enable referral coordinators to easily close gaps in care and boost patients volume. This enables practices or health plans to schedule appointments directly into their calendars in real-time and connect with their preferred payer digitally to get real benefits. You can bridge the gaps in care with the help of the following ways;
- Stronger payer-provider relationships.
- Improve call center efficiency.
- Automated outreach & self-scheduling.
- Reduce patient wait time.
- Improve patients’ show rates.
Mind the Care Gaps
Technological advancement and data analytics are opening as well as providing new opportunities for delivering high-quality healthcare services and better treating chronic health conditions. Fixing care gaps is essential to ensure that patients are getting treated efficiently and reducing the expenses by saving revenue for all_ a win-win strategy for everyone involved.
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