(This article was originally published 9/22/23 and last updated on 4/1/2024)

Patient engagement is an area that deserves considerable attention from healthcare leaders. Engaging patients helps boost revenues and prevent revenue leakage while also creating better outcomes for patients themselves. One key to improving your patient engagement initiatives is to empower patients to take charge of their care. Let’s take a look at three ways of achieving this:

Self-scheduling
Mobile connectivity, and
Access to personal health data

Short on time? Watch the byte-sized version of this blog.

Empower patients to take charge of their care with these patient engagement initiatives

Self-Scheduling

One patient engagement tactic that empowers patients to take charge of their care is self-scheduling. As several healthcare leaders recently told Becker’s Healthcare, offering a self-scheduling option can provide a better patient experience by streamlining the scheduling process and treating the patient like a consumer. Instead of calling the provider, waiting on hold, and going back and forth finding a date and time that works for both the patient and provider, patients have visibility to available appointments and can schedule their visit in just a few clicks. Mammography is one area in particular that has seen a tremendous increase in self-scheduling over the past several years.

As patients expect more consumer-friendly offerings from healthcare, providers would do well to take cues from other industries that offer self-scheduling. As an added bonus, self-scheduling also helps relieve the scheduling burden from staff.

Going Mobile

Another consumer-centric strategy to empower patients is having a strong mobile presence. We live in an increasingly mobile-centric world where people are doing more and more with their phones. That’s true in healthcare as well, with nearly 40% of patients using a smartphone to access their patient portal. Patients can schedule an appointment, pay their bill, and view their medical records on the go. This is why it’s important for healthcare providers to ensure their website or app is mobile friendly.

In addition to having a mobile-friendly site or app, mobile outreach is a great form of patient engagement. For example, sending patients SMS-based appointment reminders, links to procedure-specific instruction videos, and navigation assistance right to patients’ phones. This helps empower patients to take charge of their care by ensuring they’re properly prepared for their visit, reducing the need for rescheduling and care delays.

Accessing their Health Data

As we mentioned in the last section, patients want access to their health data wherever they are. Empowering patients with the ability to access their medical history, visit notes, test results, and more from any device is imperative in this consumer-centric world. As cyber attacks continue to plague healthcare, it’s also important that patients’ sensitive information is secure.

One great solution for empowering patients to securely access their health data from anywhere is Novarad’s CryptoChart image sharing solution, winner of the “Best New Radiology Solution” at the 2020 MedTech Breakthrough Awards. Instead of costly, time-consuming CD burning, CryptoChart generates a QR code that can be securely shared with patients, allowing them to easily access and share their medical images from a desktop or mobile device. CryptoChart’s reimagined image sharing is just one of many patient engagement solutions that can empower patients to take charge of their care.

Empowering Providers to Empower Their Patients

A strong patient engagement strategy can empower patients to take charge of their healthcare. Three patient engagement initiatives that can empower patients the most are:

Self-scheduling
Mobile connectivity, and
Secure access to their health data

At iPro, we empower providers to empower their patients through innovative solutions and top-notch support. Our Novarad South division helps improve patient access and engagement with CryptoChart. CryptoChart makes it easy for patients to securely and simply access and share their medical images and information.