Patient engagement is a continuous process. It does not end within the four walls of a clinic or hospital. Nowadays, with more awareness and desire to live healthy lives, it is vital for healthcare providers to provide an uninterrupted and better support along with guidance to make patients healthcare journey a happier one which will be based exclusively on trust and empathetic care. Here we bring some exciting facets of healthcare that are becoming popular for better patient engagement.
Health 5.0
Health 5.0 has become the latest buzzword in the field of healthcare. This more recent version of healthcare is more focused towards personalization and emergence of digital wellness. What’s new in this new stage is patients are recognized as customers and from a patient-centric healthcare, 5.0 is tilting towards customers centric wellness services.
The main focus in this face of healthcare is more towards prevention than cure.
Health 5.0 utilize AI analysis of big data spanning over diverse types of information, including personal real-time physiological data, environmental information, healthcare-site information, treatment/infection information to help customers in:
- Promoting healthy living and early detection of diseases through real-time automatic health checkups
- Providing ideal treatment anywhere through the sharing of physiological and medical data
- Using robots to ease the on-site burden of healthcare and caregiving
Moreover, these solutions will assist reduce the social costs associated with healthcare and caregiving and solve labor-shortage problems at healthcare sites.
Health Education
No one wants to be in the dark when it comes to any kind of dental treatment. Everyone wants to know about the detailed procedures and techniques the doctor perform while treating dental patients. As the awareness level on the rise, more and more patients want to know about their treatment procedures in advance. Educating the patients about the treatment can significantly improve the patient experience. Increasing patient engagement not only does help in augmenting patient’s knowledge and skills but also builds their confidence in managing their health.
Educating the patients can bridge the gap between patient and healthcare providers and assist:
- Patients in taking accountability for their health
- Patients in practicing prevention techniques at home
- In developing patient trust, satisfaction, and loyalty
- In increasing treatment acceptance rate
- In safeguarding the continuity of care between appointments
- In empowering the patients to decide the best plan of action
Moreover, rural or population with low health literacy, educating about the treatments and other can prove to a boon for the healthcare sector. As many within these populations have not experienced healthcare delivery that emphasize or encourage high levels of patient engagement.
The Arrival of Tech Gadgets
Wearable gadgets are becoming popular in today’s fast paced-life due to its fascinating features and compelling end results on the go. Whether you want to track your sleep, movements, heart rate, physical activities, calories burnt, distance traveled, active time, activity break-up in a day, or more, wearable gadgets does the work for you in a proactive manner. The ability to produce vital body stats in a hassle-free manner is what has been attracting consumers towards wearable gadgets. In a prominent survey, it was found that use of technology gadgets have increased multifold between 2014 and 2016. What’s more interesting is whopping 76 percent of patients’ follow physicians’ recommendation to use wearable gadgets as they feel more empowered with its usage and effectiveness.
Moreover, the integration of wearable gadgets and electronic health records has expanded the patient’s satisfaction level towards the optimum. The doctors have become more empowered to get the deeper insights about a particular patient’s daily activities, which ultimately assist physicians to advice better guidance to the patients. All these make the patient’s journey fruitful and assist them to live a healthy life.
Although the list is endless, and there are many other trends which are gaining popularity, but one thing that is common is – Patients are now- no more just concerned about the recovery from their diseases; they want to know about its prevention as well. Doctors and healthcare providers thus need to gear up to match the growing expectation from a tech-savvy and highly educated world population in order to maintain a cordial relationship and better patient engagement for a sure success.
