ReDoc Flash #5

{Straight talk for clients}

Each quarter we work with our in‐house experts to give you ReDoc feature highlights and share industry knowledge.

Dear ReDoc,

I want to develop stronger, deeper, and lifelong relationships with my patients. Our practice tries to keep in touch with patients during their course of treatment and after they’ve been discharged, but it’s not easy.  Do you have any helpful hints or tools to help us improve our relationships with our patients?

The Solution

Communication is key. Strong patient relationships prevent drop-out cases. Lifelong customers are formed when you communicate with patients and remind them that you care and that you’re actually listening. In turn, strong patient relationships result in increased patient satisfaction, outcomes and retention.  And most practices that keep their patients engaged realize additional revenue from reduced no-shows and new referral business. Net Health can help – read on.

Send personal messages to each of your patients

Let’s face it: busy practices don’t usually have the time or manpower to consistently communicate with each and every one of their patients.  Net Health’s new Patient Relationship Management (PRM) system automatically reaches out to every patient with personalized messages that coincide with each stage of their course of care, even after discharge.  Users of the Net Health’s PRM system report spending only 3 – 5 minutes per day interacting with patients via the PRM, ending ceaseless games of phone-tag and leaving you and your staff more time for other priorities.

Initiate real-time, customized conversations between patients and therapists

Text and email conversations have become ‘normal’ for personal and business-related communications.  [Fact: 90% of all text messages are read within 3 minutes of their delivery¹, and this study is from 2015!]  Consider an example scenario where your practice treats a lot of running injuries.  Now imagine creating a communication profile for your running patients that can automatically send discharged runners something like “How is everything going these days? How many miles are you up to now?”  Patients who feel personally ‘connected’ to their care providers tend to have better outcomes and are more likely to rate the experience of their care as “excellent.”

Improve your bottom line

It’s easy to understand why patients drop out of care if they don’t feel that their therapist listens to or personally cares about them.  And for your practice those missed/canceled visits result in lost revenue.  Short, pre-written and personalized messages, delivered automatically, help to ensure that patients remain engaged and finish their course of care.  Plus, engaged patients who have positive outcomes are more likely to refer your practice to friends, colleagues and family members who need rehabilitation services.

Concerned about patient/provider privacy and protection?

Net Health’s PRM system includes a simple patient portal which allows for HIPAA compliant communication, ensuring that sensitive communications between patients and care providers can be kept private.  And care providers’ personal contact information (phone number, email address, etc.) are hidden so you and your staff can communicate effectively and securely.

What’s next?

Want to learn more about how Net Health’s Patient Relationship Management system can help improve your relationships with your patients while growing your practice at the same time? Click here to contact us and one of our representatives will reach out with more information.

This month’s contributor was ReDoc Product Manager, Lori Collins.

¹ http://connectmogul.com/2013/03/texting-statistics/

Did you know?

Self-discharge patients can create a record-keeping dilemma for your practice. How do you ‘close the book’ so to speak when patients have made the decision to stop coming to therapy?  Successful ReDoc clients simply create a new visit when the patient calls to inform the clinic that they’re not coming back (or at some agreed upon timeframe after the patient’s last visit for those patients who don’t call), and they use that date as the ‘discharge’ date.  And as part of this ‘discharge’ visit you can indicate that the patient did not actually attend the visit, thus not impacting the patient’s number of remaining authorized visits.

If you’d like to learn how to do this in ReDoc powered by xfit check out the “Discharging Patients” in Net Health University.

This month’s contributor was Karen Sartin, MS, CCC-SLP.