How to Personalize Your Healthcare Service

The healthcare market is hugely competitive, giving patients numerous practice options to choose. The healthcare industry has become patient-driven. In such a scenario, patients look for a good experience and affordable service. According to a survey by Deloitte Consulting, customers chose the following statements to define positive healthcare experiences:

• "Doctor or other healthcare provider spends time with me and does not rush through the exam."

• "All my doctors and prescriptions are in-network and covered."

• "Minimal or no wait time at doctor's offices, laboratories and hospital waiting rooms."

• "Ability to schedule an appointment via my mobile device."

And all of these reflect the need for personalization in healthcare. Here, the one-size-fits-all approach will fail to satisfy your patients because everyone responds differently to a treatment, service, or drug. Personalization helps you predict the treatment required, improve the quality of care, and reduce expenditure on healthcare. What more can be done for personalization of healthcare services that would yield better revenue and more popularity to your practice?

Give More Time

Everyone wants to be heard and cared for. A patient who is physically, mentally or emotionally unwell wants to be heard and understood. So you need to pay special attention to them, according to their individual needs. Give appropriate time to each patient instead of rushing to accomplish the day's target. When a patient is listened to and the need for treatment is explained, she feels more involved and works on her health improvement.

Display Clear Costs

Personalization also comes with clarity of costs. In addition to affordable pricing, your patients want to know what is covered by insurance. Clarity of such crucial topics grows a patient's trust in the doctor and his practice. A patient seeks information on in-network doctors, treatments covered and not covered and even out-of-network doctors and the cost of a particular service/procedure offered.

Offer Online Appointment Scheduling

In the process of obtaining healthcare service, a patient looks forward to satisfaction with the service and no waste of time waiting for appointments. For this, you will need to offer an online appointment scheduling feature on your website. It will help your patients seek care at their convenience. Also, train your staff to offer patients delightful service that makes them visit your practice again the next time they are not well and refer you to their friends and family. You should have a patient portal page where patients can access their billing and claim data easily.

Do Email Segmentation

To offer more personalized experiences, you should send emails that are segmented on the basis of ailment, age, gender or location. For instance, if you email is a discussion on female-centric disease, then keep male members out of the list because this might disinterest them. Consequently, they might resist from opening your other emails. Irrelevant and frequent emails can put you in the spam folder of most of your target audience.

Reply to Reviews

Reviews play a major role in defining personalized healthcare experiences for an individual. Read all reviews you receive on review platforms. Thank reviewers and rethink their issues. Address assurance of improvement of service. Negative reviews should not dishearten you, rather you should learn how to deal with bad reviews. Always follow some tips and tricks in replying reviews on various platforms or your own website. Ignoring reviews is a big disappointment for your patients that can make you lose them in the long run.

Track and evaluate your steps to check if you are able to deliver personalized healthcare experiences to your patients. Remember, this will help you achieve a loyal and long-term relationship with your existing patients, boosting word-of-mouth marketing. Also, your potential patients are likely to be influenced and attracted by such activities, increasing your practice's growth and online reputation.

Manish Chauhan is Digital Marketing Manager at myPracticeReputation which is an easy-to-use reputation management solution for physicians to help monitor, protect and promote their medical practices at all times in the simplest way possible.