U.S. News & World Report recently released its 2019-2020 Best Hospitals ratings. The annual rankings are designed to help patients and doctors make informed decisions about where to seek care.

Major changes in the methodology this year include the addition of patient experience data. Positive patient experience is a crucial element of maximizing patient-centered quality, and it has been shown to correlate with better outcomes.

Simply put, hospitals with the best patient experience report better financial performance and higher clinical quality. These hospitals realize that the patient experience starts in the home, before a patient is admitted, and continues long after discharge. They connect with patients and monitor their progress throughout their entire healthcare journey, outside the four walls of the hospital in patients’ everyday lives.

Millennials are redefining what is required of healthcare. Born between 1981 and 1996 and on track to become the largest generation in the U.S, millennials are digital natives who use technology to manage every aspect of their daily lives. They expect the ease and efficiency that technology provides from their healthcare experience, too.

We’ve done the research in the infographic below to show just what this means for healthcare providers trying to engage this generation.

Should You Have an App for That?

I talk to a lot of executives and clinicians about engaging and educating patients. They overwhelmingly want to know how to best reach today’s consumers with health information. As I talk about interactive, mobile messaging, a common question is, “Do you have an app for that?”

When thinking about using a downloadable app, the questions I always ask are: Will patients use it? Will it capture their attention and engage them to come back for more next week? Will it be easy for them? With 77% of Americans using smartphones, it’s important to understand how people use apps in their daily lives to understand their potential impact on patient engagement.

More than 80,000 people died of complications from the flu last season, including at least 180 children, and the virus resulted in a record-breaking 900,000 hospitalizations.

Those astounding figures were released recently by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and U.S. Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams, M.D., M.P.H., who deemed it "critical" to focus national attention on the importance of the vaccine and the protection it provides.

Spreading that message requires that hospitals have better access to patients in their everyday lives.