It’s All About ROI: 7 Ways Patient Engagement Can Make and Save You Money
You want to provide the best care for your patients, and encouraging patient engagement can improve their outcomes, with fewer hospital readmissions and swifter recoveries. But patient engagement doesn’t just benefit the patient—it benefits you and your practice as well.
Patient engagement can actually have a huge ROI for your practice. So while it may not at first seem worth the time and effort to hit those engagement goals, it pays off in the long run.
Here are seven ways that patient engagement proves its ROI by both generating and saving money for your practice.
- Increased Patient Loyalty
When patients are engaged with their healthcare and your practice, they are more likely to stick with what works and remain loyal to their doctor. This keeps revenue in your practice! You avoid losing valued patients. It also saves you money - since you don't need to spend as much trying to attract new patients to replace the ones you lost to other practices.
- Improved Appointment Compliance
Patient engagement in your practice could mean better appointment reminders for patients, such as emails or text notifications. When patients receive reminders of their appointments, they are more likely not to miss them. This saves you money that could have been lost from no-shows and last-minute cancellations, which would otherwise leave holes in your day’s schedule—holes that mean no money being made from that appointment. Also, you can use your patient engagement system to automatically schedule follow-up appointments with patients rather than having to depend on them to remember to call back and schedule at a later date.
- More Referrals
If your patients are happy with their care and level of engagement with your practice, it’s more likely that they will recommend your practice to their family and friends above other practices or specialists. New patients mean new sources of revenue and new additions to your patient engagement system, which can lead to more referrals.
- Less Need for Ad Spending
If you’re trying to increase your patient population, you may spend money on advertising, whether that be billboards, flyers, TV airtime, or even a new set of business cards. When your patients are engaged and remain loyal to your practice, you won’t have to worry as much about using advertising to encourage patients to come back and refer others to your practice. Their ability to engage with your practice can be all the advertising you need.
- Better Bill Payment System and Reminders
Depending on the features of your patient engagement strategy, automatic bill payment reminders can be one way to keep your patients engaged with managing the costs of their care. Friendly reminders built into an online portal or app help patients stay on top of their bills so they know how much they owe and when their next payment is due. Keeping patients actively engaged with billing means you won’t have to chase down as many payments, and you’ll be more likely to be paid on time and in time to pay your own bills and employee salaries. Plus, if you make it easier for patients to pay their bill via electronic online payments, you’ll be more likely to receive those payments in a timely manner.
- More Efficient Workflow
Your patient engagement setup may include an online portal wherein patients can fill out certain paperwork ahead of time, which cuts down on time spent at the office for both patients and staff. With paperwork delivered through an electronic portal, your staff won’t have to input handwritten documentation into a database, and that information can be more readily accessible for you, your patients, and your staff online. That frees up time for them to complete other tasks or to work shorter hours.
- Greener Work Environment
With online patient portals and mobile apps, you can deliver more information electronically to use less paper, which saves both money and the environment. You can send bills and balances, payment information, and health information all via your portal or app. This also cuts down on the time that would have been spent printing and mailing those documents to patients, making your workflow still more efficient and cost-effective.
Patient engagement does involve an upfront investment, but it also comes with a return on that investment that can be seen directly in your monthly financials as time goes on. Consider these and other ways that patient engagement can make and save money for your practice when considering whether to implement a new system yourself.
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