Enhancing Patient Intake Through Pre-Appointment Visibility
In today's modern healthcare age, the patient journey often begins long before an appointment is booked. For specialty healthcare organizations, understanding and leveraging pre-patient visibility is crucial for operational efficiency, particularly for those that may be part of a managed service organization (MSO). This phase, focusing on where potential patients research and engage with your practice (or perhaps a paid media message first) offers invaluable insights, and can also help you better understand your acquisition marketing efforts.
Understanding the Pre-Patient Stage
The pre-patient stage encompasses all interactions before a formal appointment. This includes online searches, website visits, social media engagement, and interactions with digital ads. Gaining visibility during this phase allows you to understand how you may be capturing potential patients, what friction points might exist, and how to identify potential bottlenecks that could be preventing these prospects from becoming actual patients.
Data-Driven Marketing Decisioning
Visibility in the pre-patient stage also provides quantifiable data to either justify digital marketing spend, or suggest changes or modifications that may need to be made to optimize those channels. This data goes beyond inputs you may already be receiving such as website analytics, social media insights, and campaign tracking to reveal how potential patients interact with your practice, beyond an isolated data set. Examples include:
Contact Center: Who are people engaging with when they call your practice(s)? What hold/wait times are they subject to, and how many convert to an appointment?
Traffic Sources: While marketing campaigns may be driving leads, which of these are actually driving appointments? And which of these may be new patients as opposed to patients you already have?
Attribution: Which channels are influencing an appointment being made, in addition to the channel that may have “won” the appointment?
What Are The Benefits Of Better Intake Visibility?
Understanding pre-patient behavior can have an impact on multiple decisions points for many healthcare organizations, and what steps they might follow for improvement. These include optimizing content, and tailoring content and marketing materials to address common patient concerns and questions. Have a call center bottleneck? Some low-hanging fruit may be addressing common questions before a prospect even gets on the phone.
Improving patient education is another outcome of better intake visibility. Particularly in a healthcare setting, prospective patients may be nervous or hesitant to seek treatment for reasons that have nothing to do with your process. An optimized patient intake process can address concerns upfront, provide more certainty around expectations, and reduce patient anxiety.
Lastly, you can use a better intake process to build a sustainable competitive advantage. In a market where the patient often has many options to choose, you can differentiate your practice and build a strong pipeline of qualified patients who are the best match for your clinicians. This proactive approach ensures a steady flow of new patients and optimizes your operational efficiency, ultimately benefiting the entire organization.