3 Strategies to Prepare Patients (and Clinicians!) for Digital Care Delivery

Digital care is revolutionizing the way health care is delivered. From increasing patient access and improving therapeutic alliance to lowering the cost of care with scalable tools, there are countless benefits to your organization, clinicians, and the patients you serve. 

But even with all the potential benefits, any kind of change is difficult, and digital care can feel like unfamiliar territory if you’re not used to it. To effectively enroll and engage patients with digital care, you need to make sure your clinicians are bought in, understand the benefits, and are prepared to engage their patients.

Ready to start your digital care journey? Here are a few tips to get you started.

Three Best Practices for Digital Care Delivery

1. Motivate Your Clinicians

Clinicians are constantly balancing their time to deliver the care their patients deserve. Digital care will help them achieve their goals once adopted, but if your team doesn’t understand the value of digital care, why would they spend time learning how to use it in the first place? 

It’s important to clearly communicate how digital care will help them augment their ability to care, not replace them or distance them from their patients. When they understand how these tools will free up more time to spend with patients, increase communication, and improve the therapeutic alliance, they’ll be more inclined to get on board. 

Digital care comes in many shapes and forms. It can be as simple as digital home exercise programs or the telehealth consultations you might be doing today, or it can be as advanced as AI-enabled motion capture movement analysis. You know your organization best, as well as which types of digital care technology you’ll be using to advance patient care. Provide specific details to your staff about the relevant tools they’ll be using so clinicians can clearly see the application to their practice.

2. Equip Your Clinicians for Success

Congratulations! Your clinicians have bought in—but what about their patients? To get patients on board with digital care, we’ll need to demonstrate the benefits that they’ll receive from digital care too. To help your team achieve this, you should equip them with the latest motivational interviewing strategies. 

In Dawn Clifford’s course series Motivational Interviewing When You’re Short on Time, Dawn explores quick motivational interviewing strategies that you can use to get your patients on board. These include:

Building partnership: Invite your patients to be part of the conversation! Take a moment or two to ask the patient about their motivation, and connect that motivation to how digital care will help.

Setting Expectations: Give the patient an overview of what to expect from their care plan, and how digital care will factor into it. For example, explain how their home exercise program will help them progress when they’re outside of sessions so they understand the importance of performing exercises outside of the in-clinic time.

Reflective Listening: Your patients will have questions—it’s only natural! Use short, reflective listening responses to make sure their concerns feel heard.

These strategies use digital marketing psychology to get patients to not only understand the value of digital care, but also get excited about the benefits that it will have for them.

Want to learn more motivational strategies using marketing psychology? Read more in our guide, Improving Home Exercise Adherence Through Motivational and Marketing Psychology Strategies.

3. Ensure Technological Proficiency

If you went to a professional that didn’t seem to know how to use their tools, you probably wouldn’t feel very confident that they’re going to do a good job. Similarly, if clinicians aren’t comfortable using the digital care tools, patients won’t be confident in the quality of care they’re receiving. 

That’s why it’s important to provide dedicated training to your clinicians on this new technology. We suggest bite-sized training that they can pick up and fit around their busy schedules, like our course Getting Started With the Medbridge Home Exercise Program.

Getting Started With the Medbridge Home Exercise Program

Just providing product training isn’t enough to ensure your clinicians are successful though. To achieve lasting change, you need to reinforce that training as well. That’s why we created the Digital Health Academy. 

Introducing the Digital Health Academy

The Digital Health Academy is Medbridge’s comprehensive training library containing hours of material you can easily assign to staff to set them up for success with digital care. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, our team of experts created different types of education to fit the needs of your staff and organization. This includes training courses on:

Digital Health Foundations

Whether you’re onboarding new staff or rolling out new digital care tools, the Digital Care Foundations series helps clinicians learn what digital care is, how it fits into their workflow, and best practices for patient communication.

Tips, Tricks, and Monthly Challenges

Stay up to date with bite-sized microlearning courses that cover the latest best practices and strategies, including patient engagement, adherence, and behavioral psychology so your clinicians can maintain a strong therapeutic alliance with patients.

Advanced Training and Certificates

Bult for staff members looking to take the next step with digital care, Our advanced complete training programs give clinicians everything they need to become experts in motivational interviewing, telehealth treatment, and more.

Free Live Webinar

Want to see the Digital Health Academy in action? Watch our recorded webinar, where CEO Donovan Campbell showcased how the Digital Health Academy actively supports clients with education and tools tailored to facilitate organizational change and maximize the value of digital care.