The MEMOTEXT Top10 Digital Patient Engagement Best Practices
Working with our provider, academic and clinical, pharmacy and employer clients, we have been learning and capturing best practices in digital patient engagement. Here’s a sneak peek at our top 10 list of best practices we’ve been working on.
- Co-Design: Working with our product developers, designers and managers, our amazing team Wenjia and Sana, listen, empathize, prototype and consistently validate their assumptions with patients, families of patients, others with lived experience and clinical communities. See Wenjia’s article on UX in digital health keep an eye out for an updated article with some of our more recent findings and recommendations. Co-design does not stop after program creation but continues along the life of the program to ensure continuous evolution towards a better fit.
- Simplify Enrollment Experiences: Create accessible and easy-to-use interfaces to minimize barriers to adoption and reduce information overload. Minimize clicks, and provide clear instructions to enhance user engagement.
- Meet people where they are, early and often. Offer multiple channels for initial engagement where people are already engaging with relevant technologies. Do you have a patient portal/member learning center? Benefits submission form? Refill request process? Offer multiple channels for engagement and communicate consistently.
- Consistent enrollment and onboarding communication: Using plain and concise messaging regularly. Plan for integration of communications into workflows. Never underestimate the power of having local champions for recruitment.
- Accessibility: Ensure that programs are accessible. Incorporate features such as adjustable font sizes, alternative languages, alternative text for images, and compatibility with assistive technologies and multimodal communications. Check out REACH Diabetes programming ES in Spanish.
- Multichannel Approach: Offer multiple channels for engagement to accommodate patient preferences and connectivity limitations. Mobile aware websites and webapps, SMS/text messaging, WhatsApp (huge hit!), email, and voice (telephony IVRs and Voice Assistants like Alexa or Google Home).
- Be Relevant and ensure long term +90% retention: Ensure the digital experience adapts to the needs of individuals. Providing relevant personalized content, notifications, and recommendations based on patient preferences, health conditions, and demographics.
- Create and Secure Trust: Ensure strict adherence to data privacy and security regulations. Implement robust security measures to protect patient information and reassure patients about the safety of their data.
- Communicate Transparent Mutual Goals: Patients, plan members, customers may be skeptical of communications from large health stakeholders. Consider outlining mutually beneficial goals around behavior change objectives. Member, patient, health goals are aligned with organizational goals.
- Continuous Improvement: Regularly evaluate the effectiveness of your enrollment, engagement and ongoing program efficacy. Make the necessary improvements based on user feedback and analytics. Stay updated with emerging technologies and evolving patient needs to ensure ongoing adoption and engagement.
Obviously there is much more where this comes from. Things like, interoperability, establishing feedback mechanisms, gamification, incentives. The list goes on. Keep an eye out on the further development of all these concepts with us here at MEMOTEXT.