5 Tips to Retain Patients & Enhance the Patient Experience

For many hospital and private practice organizations across the U.S., patient dropoff is a continuous challenge, leading to poor outcomes, low patient satisfaction, and lost revenue. 

Organizations are turning to digital patient care to enhance the experience, improve accessibility, engage patients, and give them what they want:

• Roughly 4 in 5 patients want to use digital tools when managing their healthcare experience.¹
• 68 percent of patients are more likely to choose a provider who offers online tools.²

In order to incorporate digital patient care into your organization, here are five tips for an ideal patient experience.

Set a Strong Foundation

During your patient’s first appointment, set clear expectations about adhering to their care plan. It’s important to work with your patient to create collaborative goals by engaging in shared decision making—where the best available evidence is integrated with the patient’s values and preferences for managing their health problems. This helps you understand what’s important to your patients so you can prioritize their needs and enhance their engagement, satisfaction, and adherence to treatment.³

At the end of that first appointment, make sure your patient is set up for success when they get home. Help your patient download the MedBridge GO app and get logged in by sharing their program with them via an email or text message. MedBridge internal data demonstrated that patients were nine times more engaged in their program when it was assigned to them electronically. 

Enroll in our courses: Building Therapeutic Alliance in the Patient Evaluation and Shared Decision-Making for Improved Therapy Outcomes to define collaborative goals.³

Incorporate Patient Education

Visits with a healthcare provider are often overwhelming for patients, who can feel bombarded with information that they may not understand. In fact, two-thirds of patients report having questions after a provider encounter.⁴

Providing patients with home resources that help them understand their conditions and therapy plans encourages them to stick to their treatment plans, retain information, and feel more comfortable with their condition—94 percent of patients confirmed they would access patient education materials from their clinicians if they were available.⁴

MedBridge can help with hundreds of resources on a variety of conditions in our Patient Education Library.

• Engage patients with inviting animations and easy-to-read handouts.
• Present online, in-app, and print information appropriately for a range of health literacy levels.
• Improve inclusivity with Spanish translations.
• Share information with families to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Customize Your Patient’s Experience

Personalize your patient’s home programs to meet them where they are.

In the MedBridge HEP platform, you can easily add personalized notes to their assigned exercises to help your patient remember important details. 

MedBridge has thousands of exercises in the HEP platform featuring a wide range of models, so you can assign exercises that your patients can see themselves performing. Many exercises can also be translated to Spanish so you can provide an accessible and inclusive program to all your patients. 

Our Home Exercise Program (HEP) platform helps you keep patients activated and engaged in their therapy. Using our HEP platform, you can:

• Build custom plans using our library of 7,000+ exercises and educational resources.
• Save time with templates for commonly prescribed programs. 
• Address specialized concerns with new pelvic, vestibular, and hand therapy resources.
• Make therapy fun with our gamified patient mobile app, which may increase their adherence to treatment.⁵

Connect with Patients

Stay connected with patients between visits to build a stronger relationship. Strong therapeutic alliance—a sense of collaboration, warmth, and support between clinician and patient—is associated with improved adherence to exercise and leads to improved pain outcomes.^6-7 

When you connect with patients between visits, they feel valued and supported, ready to collaborate and trust their provider. Encourage and empower them to contribute to their own treatment and allow them to ask questions.⁶ 

With the MedBridge GO patient app and patient portal, you and your patients can message each other between visits. This makes it easy to connect between visits, and with the new CPT codes launched by CMS, you can now be reimbursed for the time you spend completing these remote therapeutic monitoring (RTM) activities.

By integrating MedBridge’s RTM Solution, organizations saw huge benefits, including:

• CORA Health Services, a top-10 national provider of outpatient therapy services, saw a 9 percent increase in evaluation conversion rate and a 12 percent increase in FOTO effectiveness scores—showing improved patient outcomes and longer lengths of stay. 
• MOTION PT Group, a network of clinics offering physical, occupational, and speech therapy, saw an 11 times higher level of engagement in enrolled patients compared to patients who had not yet enrolled.

Adapt with Your Patients

Focusing on the individualism of each patient by adapting your care to their performance can lead to better program adherence.⁶

This can include reducing or increasing exercise difficulty or providing alternatives if a participant found them painful or not in line with their personal goals.

When adjusting your patient’s plan, follow these steps:

• Review patient adherence data, messages, and pain/difficulty reports. 
• Engage with the data and use it to drive in-clinic care, conversation, and decisions. 
• Update your patient’s program frequently as they progress or provide feedback. 

MedBridge provides Patient Adherence Tracking, which allows patients to report any pain they are having or exercises they may be struggling with. You can review your patients’ progress with their home exercise program and reach out when additional support is needed. 

With MedBridge’s HEP platform, you can use templates to create standardized programs for your organization or custom programs to fit your patient’s specific needs, all from the same easy-to-use platform.

Incorporating these tips, organizations utilizing MedBridge’s solutions have seen positive results: 

• 98 percent of MedBridge providers reported improved patient satisfaction.
• 90 percent of users indicated MedBridge HEP has helped them improve patient outcomes.
• 100 percent of clinicians at Kepros Physical Therapy & Performance reported MedBridge’s HEP platform helped improve their patient adherence, satisfaction, and outcomes.
• 93 percent of patients at Alliance Physical Therapy Partners reported less pain, and 98 percent of patients reported improved functional outcomes.

To learn more about MedBridge’s Patient Engagement Solution and how it can improve patient satisfaction, adherence, and outcomes at your organization, request a demo.