As organizations continue to seek solutions that address rising healthcare costs and improve the health of their population, many have partnered with primary care companies like Marathon Health to provide healthcare directly to their employees and members.
Advanced primary care can drive significant savings, and a crucial part of that starts with patient engagement.
Why is patient engagement important?
Patient engagement is the process through which an employer and their advanced primary care partner can grow employee and member trust, awareness, and utilization of their primary care resources. Doing so encourages them to use their healthcare benefits, which can improve their health and lower patient and employer healthcare costs alike.
Engagement is a key element of a successful primary care benefit. It powers utilization, which is the primary driver of the healthcare return on investment and cost reduction that organizations are looking for.
5 ways to drive patient engagement
Organizations can increase patient engagement rates by finding ways to apply these five best practices to their healthcare benefit strategy.
Collaboration
The best place to start, really, is committing to work in tandem with your primary care partner. Trusting in their expertise while helping make sure chosen engagement strategies resonate with your population will help to make sure your efforts to grow patient engagement are built on a solid foundation. This collaboration can help build trust and awareness between your people and your primary care partner.
Personalization
Advanced primary care lets you choose a tailored healthcare solution that meets the needs of you and your population. Why stop there? Choosing communication channels and plans that resonate with who your workforce will make it more likely that your communications promoting your primary care benefit will be read, understood, and remembered.
Provider-led outreach
Keep in mind, your voice doesn’t need to be the only one in the room. Having your health center staff participate in outreach can help begin – and even strengthen - relationships between provider and patient, even if your workers haven’t yet stepped through the health center door.
Additionally, your care team can conduct key outreach after events such as a biometric screening or health fair that lets you target high-risk individuals who need to be seen by a primary care provider. Biometrics results or answers to screening questionnaires or health risk assessments help providers engage those who need it most.
Incentives
It’s hard to overstate the effect incentive programs can have when growing engagement. A well-designed and implemented incentive program can get even the most reluctant among your population to engage with their healthcare benefits. It can break down walls and begin to connect them with their care team, beginning to build what could be life-changing relationships. A small cash reward or other prize could be the catalyst of a life-changing healthcare journey. Once they are in the door, your primary care team can provide the exceptional experience needed to get them coming back.
Easy access
When you’ve done the hard work to grow awareness, build trust, and encourage engagement you need to ensure that when your patients try to use their primary care benefit, they can do so without headache. This is a big moment, especially for hesitant individuals. Making their primary care benefit easy and convenient — with good experiences before, during, and after the appointment — makes it more likely that a patient will come back for future visits.
Not just one, but all
These best practices will be beneficial for you on their own, but they really should be used in tandem with each other. A comprehensive engagement strategy using all five approaches will set you up to grow engagement, reduce healthcare costs, and improve the health of your population.
