You don’t need to see decades’ worth of research to know that informed, involved patients tend to have better outcomes and are more satisfied with your care. A patient engagement solution can lead to healthier lifestyles and habits, making it easier to adhere to your care plan.
Engaged patients expect quality care on their terms, and are less willing to accept any delays or inconveniences in their healthcare. If your care team enables patient engagement in a way that allows both providers and patients to communicate and follow protocols more efficiently, you can increase patient satisfaction and even cut costs.
Without an effective patient engagement solution, clinicians scramble between diverse toolsets throughout their days that disrupt workflows, care quality, and health outcomes.
Before choosing a patient engagement solution, make sure your team considers the following factors.
Your patient engagement solution should be easy to scale.
In order to expand its reach and efficiency, your care team needs to find a patient engagement solution that meets its unique program and workflow needs and streamlines patient communication.
Once you’ve narrowed down your top choices, ask these questions about each patient engagement software you’re considering:
Does it improve outcomes?
According to a study published in Harvard Business Review, teams that implemented effective healthcare patient engagement solutions saw a 96% medication compliance rate. The same patients with chronic conditions who used to visit the emergency room a few times per year gradually stopped visiting altogether, saving money and potentially risky interventions.
Remotely sharing patient data with providers and actively communicating with their care team created a better workflow for engaging with patients, which improved their outcomes. Next-generation patient engagement allows providers to share protocols quickly and efficiently.
Does it enable your team to reach more patients?
Providers can spend more time serving new patients when their time is not spent on patients who repeatedly visit the emergency room. The National Institutes of Health found that effective patient engagement solutions improve the efficiency of patient-provider communication. When care coordination and data collection is automated, patients become more involved in their care. Fewer need surgery or get discharged to nursing facilities and rehabilitation centers. More of them take their health into their own hands at home—improving patient experience.
This means they spend less time with clinicians, who then have more of it to share with new patients. Because engaged patients are satisfied with their care, they’re more likely to refer friends and family which helps you grow your practice.
Does it reduce clinician burnout?
Deloitte Insights reports that patient engagement software solutions onboard, educate, and engage patients (as well as their referrals) much earlier in the disease progression, driving better outcomes. These omnichannel platforms include patient portals with patient messaging, intake, patient scheduling, appointment reminders, and dosage reminders via mobile apps, email, or SMS.
When patient data and messaging lives in one transparent place, healthcare provider collaboration is easier to manage and less time-consuming. The more timely and relevant their health information, the less clinicians need to dig around or ask associates.
Rigorous experience- and data-driven patient engagement solutions allow clinicians to “hyper-target” patients according to disease stage, age, or treatment, as well as a preferred communication channel—another shortcut that saves time and energy.
Does it lower your costs?
The Brookings Institution found that patient engagement solutions improved the patient experience by streamlining and improving the quality of patient communication as well as provider-provider communication.
The shift to patient-centered care helps all stakeholders recognize when a clinical procedure or treatment may not be necessary or when a decision may need to be delayed per patient preferences, which are built into the patient portal from the beginning of the care plan. This streamlined patient data management eliminates redundant appointments and time-consuming health information searches.
Does it work for all of these care team members?
Administrators and clinicians may have slightly different preferences and priorities when choosing a patient engagement solution, but if you research and test-run enough of them, you’ll find one that streamlines all of your health information and program management in one accessible, easy-to-use patient portal that simplifies workflows for all team members.
Developers will need a configurable, centralized patient engagement platform with a strong Application Programming Interface (API)—the ability for multiple applications to interact and exchange data with one another. This provides transparency and a higher-quality user experience.
Clinicians demand a patient engagement solution that makes patient information accessible and easily digestible. They may need it to integrate old Electronic Health Records (EHRs) with new, real-time health information and make patient visits and protocols accessible to all specialists. They will also need a way to communicate with patients and send reminders.
Clinical directors need role-based access features since they make daily decisions about information access for team members. A codeless program editor will allow them to define their team’s roles, functionality, and information access—without engineers or specialists. The right platform will allow them to easily modify protocols and simplify the patient journey.
Patients and lab technicians could use third-party app integrations that enable your team to connect a wide range of apps for various conditions, expanding the platform’s capabilities. Whether practicing telehealth via video conference or simplifying a lab order, apps help create a wider community of care.
Why Welkin Health is the patient engagement solution you need
To satisfy all of your stakeholders and optimize your care and reputation, you should invest in the premier patient engagement software solution: Welkin Health.
This next-generation platform helps you streamline workflows, improve outcomes, decrease clinician burnout, cut costs, protect patient data, and expand patient reach by enabling you to:
Improve communication with centralized conversations
Every patient is unique—so you want to make sure their experience with you is, too. Welkin helps you harness the power of healthcare relationships to put trust back into the healthcare experience. Redefine how patients and care teams interact by simplifying communication.
Managing treatment takes frequent check-ins and communications through a variety of modalities. Welkin’s omnichannel capabilities support check-ins through every step of care, give peace of mind that you’ll never miss a message, and help you connect with patients where they are.
Leverage team-first care delivery
To achieve a healthcare experience as unique as your care team, you need to deliver the right care at the right time. We know it takes a village to create a curated experience for every patient at the intersection of digital health and physical health.
Welkin was designed for modern care teams like yours. Our system intelligently addresses care coordination. It assigns necessary team members to address patient needs at the right moment of the patient journey, maximizing your most precious resource—your care team’s time. It eliminates the possibility of people falling through the cracks and improves your team’s outcomes.
Enjoy intelligent workflows
Welkin allows you to create smoother processes for your team and empower your clinicians to do more for patients by asking them to do less. Your clinicians will be able to build something your community can trust and that allows you to adjust to rapidly changing patient needs.
Welkin’s system improves team efficiency by automating processes and intelligently moving patients through their journey: from assessments, to processes, to notifications, to email nurture campaigns. These automations lessen burden and burnout and allow your team to do what they do best—care.
Our platform supports the patient journey in six stages: patient identification, assessment, enrollment, care delivery, course-correcting, and finally, conclusion or maintenance of care.
Create integrations
Welkin allows you to customize your platform to support your growth plans and build your own system that works with your existing and future systems. With leading integrated applications already built in, along with APIs for you to build whatever else you want, you can create software that works as well for you now as it will when you grow.
Our platform integrations include:
- eSign: use our DocuSign integration to complete secure document signing.
- MedRec: validate medications with Medi-Span directly within Welkin.
- eRx: leverage our integration with DrFirst to fulfill electronic drug prescriptions.
- Telehealth: leverage Welkin’s HIPAA-compliant Zoom for Healthcare integration.
- Billing: use codified reference data to support your billing process.
- Analytics: view or build your own dashboards and reports with Sisense.
- Calendar Solutions: sync with external calendar providers within Welkin.
- API-first development
We provide you a platform that was built to function. Our promise to our customers is that we value function over form. We support your team in delivering outcome-driven care, and we know you need a tool that supports you in that mission.
Welkin’s patient engagement solution enables your team to connect any third-party apps needed to expand the platform’s reach and functionality as demanded by patients and required by clinicians. A video conference on the go? No problem. A new lab test requested? Order it in minutes. And will all this health information be safe and secure? Absolutely. Welkin is SOC 2-certified and complies with HIPAA and FDA regulations.
Design without coding
A single connected platform enables your team to build and fine-tune workflows to make your day run more smoothly. Our codeless program editor allows you to easily customize your program with no code or hassle.
Design your care plan without developers, engineers, or specialists. Just drag and drop—adapt your layout to suit your needs. Welkin also provides templates, guides, and content to simplify your build.
Ensure platform security
Welkin takes security seriously. With the help of leading third-party security organizations, we’ve implemented a number of technical, administrative, and physical safeguards designed to protect your data. Welkin features:
- SOC 2 Type 2 certification
We undergo an independent third-party Service Organizational Controls (SOC) Type 2 examination annually to ensure security, availability, and confidentiality of customer data. - HIPAA compliance
We enable covered entities and their associates subject to the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) to use its secure environment to process, maintain, and store protected health information. - Permissions
We protect the integrity of your data as you share it between roles and teams using flexible role-based, attribute-based, and geography/territory-based security permissions. - Audit trail and security log
Use our time-stamped audit trail to track who, when, and where user-level changes were made. The security log allows you to see every security action that has taken place. - Organizational Security Controls
For added security, your team can leverage multi-factor authentication (MFA) or single sign-on (SSO).
Welkin’s wide range of tools lets you bring your own data (from app or data system) to the mix and view it all in a centralized location. The custom reports and dashboards you build in the Welkin platform make decision-making easier and allow clinicians to have their say, simplify complex data, and unlock powerful insights—all without learning how to code.
Analytics functionality on Welkin supports a wide range of libraries. You can holistically import or export data on the population you’re assessing, treating, and measuring outcomes for. When all this valuable health information is integrated within your patient engagement solution, you’ll be able to measure and understand the effectiveness of your programs, predict future outcomes, identify trends, and make all necessary adjustments to optimize care for each patient.
If you’ve been reading and imagining how much your team would appreciate Welkin and thrive using it, you should see it in action.
Experience the ease of Welkin for yourself by scheduling a demo.