How to help your EHR deliver retail-style digital patient engagement

Aug 02, 2022 at 12:17 am by Staff


By Paul Shorrosh

Patients expect a consumer-grade healthcare experience, but overwhelmingly, they're not getting it. This shortcoming can overshadow even best clinical patient experience. Long waiting room times, clunky, manual registration processes and poor visibility into financial responsibility are all common headaches for patients. But what if navigating healthcare was as easy as online shopping, banking and booking travel?

The healthcare industry lags at least a decade behind e-commerce giants like Amazon, travel industry leaders like Expedia and large financial institutions that set the standard for intuitive, consumer-friendly online engagement. Like them, healthcare organizations have spent millions over the past two decades to digitize; however, most of that money was spent on installing and integrating electronic health record systems, not on improving patient access or financial experience.

While EHRs provide a wide array of clinical capabilities, hospitals are often disappointed to find significant gaps in patient access and digital engagement functionality. This is a growing problem, because as tasks historically handled by staff are transitioned to patients, the registration and financial experience is becoming a bigger factor in patient satisfaction. Increasingly, the financial experience is intertwined with the clinical patient experience, so much so that 93% of consumers say the quality of their billing experience is an important factor in whether they will return to a provider.

Most forward-thinking hospitals and health systems recognize the importance of the non-clinical customer experience as a differentiator and an increasingly important factor in retaining and attracting patient volume. They realize their EHR alone can’t deliver the market-leading, digital patient experience patients expect. It requires the right technology partner and an investment in a platform that complements their EHR. Combining the EHR’s capabilities in clinical data management with the right digital patient access, intake and engagement solution fills EHR gaps and increases the value and interaction with the EHR by providing insights into the following:

Often providers have a disjointed patchwork of vendors and systems trying to provide an optimal patient access and financial experience. Besides the EHR vendor, one vendor typically provides online scheduling, while another delivers pre-registration and registration services. Yet another offers communication tools, such as automated appointment reminders, digital front door and virtual waiting room, while a fourth vendor provides eligibility, basic patient cost estimates and point-of-service payment processing. This list can go on and on, creating an ever-greater mishmash of vendors that adds to complexity, rework, dissatisfaction and higher costs.

It’s past time for piecemeal solutions that don’t fully solve the healthcare consumerism challenge. Today, it’s imperative for healthcare organizations to fully commit to improving the consumer experience. Adopting a single-source digital solution that empowers patients and healthcare organizations will help hospitals and health systems provide the convenient, flexible digital experience patients now expect so the next time they need healthcare services, they’ll come back.

Paul Shorrosh is the CEO and founder of AccuReg, a healthcare technology company that integrates with electronic health record systems to increase patient engagement by enabling digital intake, patient registration and price transparency across health systems, hospitals, ambulatory settings and telehealth applications. A solutions-oriented healthcare thought leader and entrepreneur, he has nearly 30 years of revenue cycle experience.

Sections: Business/Tech