The patient experience holds a paramount position in the realm of healthcare. As a cornerstone of quality care, it influences patient satisfaction, loyalty, and even clinical outcomes. In the modern era, technology has emerged as a potent force in shaping patient interactions, paving the way for a healthcare transformation that enhances the patient experience and the healthcare provider’s ability to deliver an excellent experience.
This blog post delves into the profound impact of technology on the provider experience and patient engagement, communication, and empowerment, exploring the evolution of patient portals, the power of enhanced communication, improved patient engagement, and the technological innovations that can reshape future experiences of patients and providers.
Patient portals represent a pivotal advancement in healthcare technology, offering patients and providers a digital hub for seamless communication and information exchange. These portals provide easy access to health records, test results, and past medical notes, enabling patients to take charge of their health journey. Nearly 40% of patients in 2021 used patient portals, but work on improving the user experience still needs to be done because many individuals struggle with access to their medical records.
Appointment scheduling, medication management, and health education resources can all be conveniently housed within a single digital gateway for patients to take control of their health. The benefits extend to healthcare providers, fostering efficient communication and streamlined care coordination through messaging applications to communicate about medication management, scheduling, and simple medical questions.
The future of patient portals may also incorporate patients transmitting at-home health information, but adoption of such an approach currently remains low.
Modern healthcare technology fosters improved communication between patients and providers. Secure messaging systems enable direct interaction, from complex medical queries to simple appointment confirmations. These systems help increase communication frequency, ensuring that patients can connect with providers through their preferred means. Furthermore, patients feel more confident in their ability to follow up with their providers beyond the few minutes that they have at a doctor’s appointment.
With the incorporation of patient-facing technologies, hospitals are seeing improved evaluations of the patient experience. However, developers of this technology must be mindful of usability challenges, such as a cluttered interface and alert fatigue. Also, the added workload may contribute to burnout for providers.
Telemedicine takes communication, collaboration, and healthcare transformation a step further, offering virtual consultations that reduce the various burdens of in-person visits, such as travel time and parking costs. Telehealth has become an increasingly popular medium for delivering patient care, with more than one-third of patients receiving virtual care in 2022 and three-fourths of patients planning to continue to utilize it.
From a provider’s perspective, telemedicine is a way to reduce costs while increasing revenue and delivering better care to the community at large, as patients with telehealth access miss their appointments less frequently.
Technology actively encourages patient participation in treatment decisions, offering tools like pre-appointment surveys that capture patient preferences. In challenging healthcare environments, it soothes anxiety with distraction tools like entertainment options for children and calming design elements built into diagnostic equipment.
An example of this is a sentient suite incorporated into magnetic resonance imaging that helps patients have a stress-free and comfortable experience during a lengthy imaging session. Personalized engagement deepens patient satisfaction and loyalty. This can be achieved through customizing the patient experience, such as allowing the patient to choose the music during an imaging session. It can also include communicating via innovative mediums outside healthcare institutions, such as on social media and through short-form videos that educate patients about the latest medical advancements and best health practices.
Social media is currently seen as an opportunity to increase research engagement, social mobilization of health activities, and facilitate offline health services.
Artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, and other emerging technologies will revolutionize patient interactions by better personalizing health information and education. Wearable devices and health-monitoring solutions allow for proactive care, exemplified by the use of the Oura ring during the 2020 NBA bubble.
The Internet of Things (IoT) paves the way for hospital-at-home concepts, transforming patient care by enabling continuous remote monitoring and removing common pain points of in-patient hospital experiences, such as hospital food, incessant alarms, annoying roommates, and middle-of-the-night vital checks.
The infusion of technology into healthcare heralds a transformational era, where the patient experience is elevated to new heights because patients have greater and quicker access to their health information. This empowerment enables providers to be better teammates in their patients’ care experiences. From patient portals to AI-driven interactions and IoT integration, technology is offering enhanced patient engagement, communication, and empowerment.
While these technological experiences benefit patients and providers, there’s still work to be done to ensure that patients and providers can easily utilize these technologies to provide better experiences, increase access to medical care, and improve health outcomes so everyone can live a better life.
Here at OtterSoft, we help healthcare technology providers drive innovation and integrate systems to seamlessly enable healthcare organizations to identify areas for improvement and implement changes to enhance patient experiences continually. See how we can help you overcome healthcare innovation challenges by strategically partnering with a development team.
