Is omnichannel engagement a rocket science for the hospitals?
While other industries are handling digital transformation at breakneck pace, our industry is still taking a cautious approach to digitalization. Those who have had previous digital engagements with other firms expect a similar approach from hospitals. Do we still believe we have the luxury of managing our services in the traditional manner?
Hospitals and clinics must develop a methodical approach to acquiring and integrating new technology into their existing systems. Several approaches might be employed, but I will share our experience with you on how we organized our omnichannel setting so you can hear firsthand.
Need Assessment
The initial stage in our service development was digital patient experience mapping, which helped us identify the digital touch points. Patients' healthcare journey mapping aids in seeing highs, lows, and blind spots in the patient engagement cycle from beginning to conclusion. Understanding your patient's clinical and emotional journey will help you get a comprehensive picture of what your patient is going through throughout this time. We focused on communication areas that might improve the patient experience throughout omnichannel development.
Touch Points
Patients expect simple access to knowledge and the ability to assess their requirements, request services, and make appointments prior to the service. They also want to maintain contact with the service provider after the service for reports, inquiries, and future reference.
Conventional hospitals have solely provided call center services for informational purposes. Waiting times, effective information management, and call-back issues have long been high on the priority list for service enhancement. In today's environment, we must employ digital solutions that are simple to use, interoperable with other systems, scalable, and easy to maintain.
We have categorized omnichannel points as
Prehospital
In-Hospital
Prehospital Omnichannel engagement
Website: 92% of consumers do visit Google search engine before any kind of service procurement. Google will only help you if you have a solid website. Every year, the concept of a solid website evolves based on customer expectations, lifestyle, and other elements that they are accustomed to seeing in other industries or firms. We designed a user-friendly and search engine-friendly website with a variety of patient education materials and linked these patient education materials with appropriate specialty physicians, so that the call to action page could generate a booking opportunity.
Social Media: We built our marketing operations around the thought leadership approach and developed a year-long plan to share content with audiences in order to educate them. In this approach, we developed the initial point of contact for those looking for information about medical concerns, which is then connected to our website. Specialty selection has been a major focus, with obvious implications for patient flow and departmental growth in the hospital.
Digital Ads: In today’s world, companies can’t wait people to follow them, but we should also attract potential consumers by reaching them in the digital world, where they visit. This could be search engine, news website, other websites, which allow programmatic ads. All these ads have been designed and structured with the same strategy as the website and other media channels managed.
Booking: Booking is the action for any activity in the healthcare business. We should focus on activities that may be the catalyst for bookings, but we should also make booking easy for diverse types of customers.
The first thing that springs to mind is a call center. The model you choose to structure and train your call center agents will determine the operation's success. Most agents are non-medical staff members by default, and they will require good training not just in contact center technics, but also in medical awareness (i.e medical terminology).
In addition to the call center, we have included an Online Chat feature to the website allowing these visitors to engage directly with an agent. Online chat has always had the highest booking conversion rate when compared to all other channels. We eventually changed the online chat program to Whatsapp, which provided another simple platform for contact with the hospital. Our plan is to implement AI in later stage to let our patients manage a self-booking opportunity themselves.
Google Maps is now everyone's life guide, and Google Maps just incorporated a chat capability for these hospital visitors. We were the first hospital to activate the Google Maps Chat option, which aided us in acquiring numerous patients.
Millenials, in particular, prefer not to interact with others and prefer to handle their services through a website. This prompted us to develop an Online Self-Service Booking Platform that allows patients to book, reschedule, or cancel appointments at any time.
E-Mail Communication: Each project's success will be defined at the commencement. We developed an efficient patient registration model as a result of this strategy, which allows us to categorize patients and engage with each community differently. E-mails have significantly assisted us in raising awareness about the hospital and its services through a focused community approach.
In-Hospital Omnichannel engagement
Pre-hospital solutions are already active for people in the hospital and they can reach to hospital via all channels, however in the hospital, we can utilize other channels too.
Internal Screens: While patients and relatives visiting the hospital, our internal screens are an amazing tool to inform them about the services, available physicians, campaign and important occasions. We made sure that our internal screens introduce the same message as the other channels, so we can boost the impact of any campaign. These screens are not just limited to wall mounted TVs, but also screens in the elevators and large screens in the main lobby.
Doctor Signages: We have used ipads at each physcian room signage. These ipads were another channel for us to communicate the messages and occasional campaign details with our patients. Thos patients waiting to see the doctor are able to follow the messages on the ipads.
Campaign Messages: Even though, we love digital communication, we have also utilized small catalogue communication for certain campaigns at the reception and waiting areas. Each of these catalogues have QR code for patients to submit their data and reach to services easily. Medication home delivery, antenatal courses, cosmetic campaigns, etc were couple of carefully selected campaigns for that channel.
Leadership and staff engagement
Out of all other options, the best omnichannel option could be the communication via our own staff members. Patients might approach hospital employees and inquire about services and procedures. Prior to taking any other action, we need to manage employee engagement. By holding weekly town hall meetings at our hospital, we provided our physicians the chance to introduce themselves to the whole staff via virtual meeting tools. With this chance, we were able to educate our personnel about our hospital and transform each member into a communication ambassador.