Hospital executives and patient educators often ask me how patients—particularly younger ones—like to communicate with their doctors nowadays in the age of millennials and apps.
Patients are people and we need to engage them as such. Regardless of age or other factors, they use email and text all the time in their daily lives and want to communicate with their doctors, hospitals and physician practices through those channels too.
Our team researched this question and compiled the findings into an infographic that is full of information about patients' health communication preferences and how hospitals can manage a patient's episode of care better when they share patient education proactively through email and text.
In fact, not only does emailing and texting patients about their care work better to improve health outcomes and promote behavior change, it can save you a lot of time and money. Just imagine not having to answer all those patient calls with common questions, scheduling unnecessary doctors' appointments or worse, dealing with costly hospital readmissions.
Whether you want to amp up your patient engagement strategy or educate patients in a more efficient way, it just makes sense to employ the technology that patients already use.
To learn more about texting patients about their care, click here.