A Better Patient Experience Starts With a Better Online Experience

A Better Patient Experience Starts With a Better Online Experience

Mobile apps, Internet consulting, social media, emails and custom websites have brought a paradigm shift in the healthcare services. Patients seek nothing less than the best – in terms of healthcare services or digital experiences.

Demand creation transforms the economics of all businesses and has revamped the healthcare industry, as well. Digital channels have broadened the healthcare horizon and opened up new opportunities for physicians and patients. Physicians, dentists and hospitals are increasingly adapting to this seismic shift and are now moving away from relying on the traditional mode of marketing, i.e. word-of-mouth referrals, to carefully strategized digital marketing strategies. Patient experiences form the epicenter of healthcare and now a better patient experience definitely starts with a better online experience.

Patients now extensively refer to social media and other digital platforms to manage health and make their health decisions after thorough analysis. Healthy online relationships with patients can drive up appointments and referrals, increasing profits for your practice. Hospitals and physicians need to think like marketers to better understand and participate in digital conversations as these can directly impact their online brand perception and reputation.

Here’s how you can create better digital patient experiences:

Educate your patients by sharing informative articles and preventive healthcare tips

A key component of digital healthcare marketing is to create impactful physician-patient communications that inform, influence and motivate patients to make better health decisions to improve their quality of life.

Patients are digitally empowered and information-hungry, constantly looking out to learn new things and gathering essential information to make informed health decisions. Regularly post articles, messages, tips and blogs to educate your patients and schedule them to be posted on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or in emails. This helps in establishing a sense of trust and credibility about your practice among all patients and other readers who can be potential patients in future. You can be in touch with your patients even if they aren’t visiting you. This helps build loyalty along with a positive reputation, and these can be the determining factors for growth of your practice.

Communicate frequently

The best way for healthcare providers to embrace this approach is through focusing their efforts on fulfilling patient needs, wants and desires by listening, responding, providing and adapting.

But how often do you reach out to your patients? Successful enterprises and businesses don’t just communicate with prospects and their existing customers on special days. It’s very important to communicate frequently with your patients and know what they think and feel about your practice. By encouraging open communication, you can build positive relationships with your patients, which in turn will help you understand what they feel about the services offered at your practice. It’s possible to combine email, face to face, social media, physician-review websites and phones for connecting and communicating with your patients. Carefully analyzing and proactively tracking what services patients look for regarding their health needs can provide an insight into their minds.

To innovate and evolve with the changing mind-set of patients and an effective communication strategy is indispensible in today’s competitive world and is a vital key to maintaining a strong brand image.

Take the first step to protect your online reputation and request your Online Reputation Assessment.