Saying “I Do” to Patient Engagement
Updox Shares Lessons Learned From Health Care Practices Successfully Leveraging Patient Communication Tools to Improve Health Outcomes and Lower Health Care Costs
Dublin, Ohio, Sept. 25, 2014 – Have you ever tried calling on a Monday morning to schedule a doctor’s appointment? You might easily spend 15 minutes on hold with a busy practice. Anyone with an Internet connection can order a pizza, schedule a car repair appointment or share their latest social media status globally in seconds but only 20% of us are able to communicate online with our medical practice to schedule our own appointments or request a refill. Other businesses offer communications technology to meet consumer demand. It’s time health care caught up.
Patients are demanding convenient, secure ways to interact at their convenience with their physicians. Patient engagement is the strategy that maximizes technology and makes it meaningful for both people and practices. Practices that want to stay in business have to offer these services. Some say “It’s difficult to get started,” or “Patients won’t use it,” or “It’s too time consuming.” Instead, the questions that practices focused on patient engagement should be asking are “Where do I start?”, “How can we keep it going?” and “How much time will this take?” Updox customers are already engaging patients online with great success and Updox has gathered the best ideas and resources to help others get started.
“In terms of cost and resources, the effort it takes our practice to care for 10 patients who actively use our portal is equal to what is required to care for one non-portal patient,” says Kari Jewett, office manager, Family Medicine of Jonesborough, Jonesborough, TN. “In fact, 78% of our patients use the portal to view results, book appointments, update demographics and pay their bills. Our staff makes 50 fewer calls each day. As a result of having more time, we’re able to offer more personalized care.”
To facilitate patient engagement and create stronger links between consumers and health care professionals, Updox, the industry leader for physician connectivity and CRM solutions for health care, has taken their experience of working with thousands of practices to make communicating with patients a reality and consolidated that knowledge base into a resource page to help physician practices increase patient portal adoption and encourage patient engagement. Content available at www.updox.com/patient-engagement includes benchmarking success stories, tips and tools to support portal adoption, on-demand Webinars and blogs and more. Content and suggestions will continue to be added through a forthcoming Updox user community for idea exchange and benchmarking.
The benefits of patient engagement are far-reaching. According to a study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, patients not engaged in their own care can cost 21% more than “highly engaged” patients. Not only do patient engagement tools motivate patients to take the lead in their care, they also significantly improve office efficiency through reduced no-shows, improved workflows, and fewer staff hours spent calling patients and following up on phone messages.
“Strategic patient engagement doesn’t have to take a great deal of time. When done well, it actually saves time and allows for more focused patient care,” says Michael Morgan, chief executive officer, Updox. “Updox has collected input from physicians and practices that are using their portals successfully in a way that doesn’t require significant additional resources on their part and maximizes the relationship between patient and practice to dramatically improve the patient experience, which benefits the practice’s bottom line.”
Once practices open the lines of communications for patient engagement, it’s vital they keep them going. Updox’s resources include initial suggestions to encourage immediate portal adoption, as well as ideas for maximizing the communications channel introduced by the portal for longer-term customer relationship management and benefits.
About Updox
Providing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for health care, Updox is the industry leading Physician Connectivity Platform. More than 45 electronic health record (EHR) vendors, representing 140,000 physicians, selected Updox as their Health Information Service Provider (HISP) of choice to be a part of the Updox Direct Network (UDN). With our CRM solutions, health care providers and practices can easily manage communications from one inbox, streamline physician relationships, drive collaboration with partners and engage patients – all integrated with the practice’s existing EHR. Practices benefit through improved relationships with patients and other providers, increased revenues, reduced costs, and enhanced business efficiencies.
Updox services are available directly to independent physicians or through partnerships with EHR vendors to help practices run more efficiently, increase revenues and offer patients a more satisfying experience. More than 30,000 members have joined Updox to change how medical practices collaborate and share information.
Updox achieved full accreditation with the Direct Trusted Agent Accreditation Program (DTAAP) as a Health Information Service Provider/Registration Authority/Certificate Authority (HISP/RA/CA) from DirectTrust.org and the Electronic Healthcare Network Accreditation Commission (EHNAC). Additionally, Updox is a founding member of Carequality. Formed by Healtheway, Carequality is an open, transparent and inclusive industry-driven effort that convenes stakeholders and facilitates industry consensus to develop and maintain a standards-based interoperability framework to enable information exchange between and among networks.
Find out what Updox can do for you. Visit www.updox.com, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, connect with us on LinkedIn, watch us on YouTube or join our Google+ circle.
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