Here are three top recommended ways to reach your patients and drive patient engagement. (Even without patients needing to open an App!)
Many remote patient monitoring programs (RPMs) spend all their focus on prioritizing patient enrollment during deployment. Often, the challenge with RPM programs is not enrollment, but trying to keep patients engaged. In most cases, there are some behavioral barriers preventing the ongoing use of an RPM platform. Even when it comes to doing the necessary, routine action to support their treatment plan. Using a few simple approaches, you can reach patients and influence their engagement behaviors. Don’t worry, they don’t just rely on patients using an App or having internet access to make this happen.
Below are Harmonize Health's top three recommendations to reach your patients and drive engagement. These recommendations start from the least to most disruptive patient experience.
Push notifications are little snippets of content sent to your phone by an App. You can send notifications any time; patients don’t have to be in the App or using their device to receive them. The only prerequisite is the patient must enable notifications in their App settings.
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Text messaging is a form of electronic messaging with words, symbols, emoticons, links, and so on. They do require a correct patient mobile phone number on file. Text messaging is now a more popular way for marketing outreach, so before rolling out, review any relevant legal rules for complete compliance.
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Phone calls are the most personalized way of connecting between patients and providers, but also the least scalable.
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Notice, that email messages didn’t make the list of the top ways we recommend reaching a patient to drive patient engagement. As you probably have encountered, email is a common (over) used marketing and communications channel. Patient reach through an email channel presents a challenge as your email competes with other emails flooding in daily. Also, Emails are a highly visual medium. Meaning, that they often require extra resources to develop or maintain to achieve opens and click-throughs. The last significant reason emails didn’t make the top of the list is because they require internet access.
In the end, it’s not just about running an RPM program that achieves high patient enrollment. You want to keep patients engaged and effectively reach patients so they adhere to their care plans - sometimes for months but most times longer. By monitoring your RPM program and using effective approaches like push notifications, text messages, and phone calls, you can help motivate patients to sustain patient engagement.
Do you want to take these recommended patient engagement tactics a step further? Use this Cheat Sheet on helpful tips and best practices for using push notifications, text messages, and phone calls to achieve high patient engagement in your RPM program.