As part of streamlining their operations, many healthcare facilities are already using patient engagement software solutions. This software plays a big role in connecting healthcare providers and patients, making all the processes seamless. Just like many other sectors, the healthcare field is also experiencing growth and expansion, hence the need to adopt digital solutions that simplify and streamline all operations.

That is why this guide describes all the insights you need to hear about patient engagement software, including the benefits, features, development processes, and common challenges, among many other insights.

What is a patient engagement software?

Patient engagement software is a digital platform with advanced tools that streamline operations while connecting patients with healthcare providers.

Through such a platform, healthcare setups can perform diverse tasks such as registration processes, appointment scheduling, and processing payments, among many other tasks in a more convenient and streamlined manner.

Other tasks that a patient engagement software solution simplifies include the following:

• Sharing announcements and updates with the patients
• Connecting and communicating with patients seamlessly
• Gathering patient’s feedback in a timely manner for specific actions
• Following up on patient appointments for professional service delivery
• Monitoring the patient’s healthcare journey, among many other activities.

With this said, patient engagement software solutions promote customer satisfaction, a smooth working environment for employees, and top-notch performance & service delivery.

Types of patient engagement software

The healthcare field is vast. This means there are different types of patient engagement software solutions designed to deliver different solutions. Below are some of the major types of patient engagement software solutions you need to know:

Appointment reminders– the key functionality of such patient engagement software solutions is to ensure patients don’t miss any scheduled doctor appointments. Some features to prioritize in appointment reminders patient engagement software platforms of communication channels such as automated calls, texts, and even emails.

RPM – Remote Patient Monitoring platforms – these are software solutions designed to help healthcare professionals access and offer better healthcare services to patients in remote areas. Some of the key features to prioritize when building such solutions include wearables, sensors, and any other tools that facilitate remote monitoring. With the collected insights through such platforms, healthcare providers can create treatment plans for patients with chronic illnesses.

Patient portals– patient portals are a significant aspect of patient engagement software solutions. They play a key role in facilitating self-care services for patients. This means that the patients can log in to the portal and perform several tasks on their own, such as scheduling appointments and booking repeat prescription orders. Some features to prioritize when building patient portals are the registration of user-profiles and ease of navigation.

Telemedicine software solutions – these are software solutions that make virtual consultations with distance medical professionals possible. Through such systems, patients can access medical services through video calls or messaging medical experts. They can ask questions, get immediate answers, get prescriptions, and have professional treatment plans without having to visit the healthcare facility physically.

Patient surveys–A patient survey is a digital software solution that gives patients a perfect platform to share their views, concerns, and thoughts on medical services with a wider community.

Social support &community systems – these are platforms that create an active and interactive environment, allowing patients and the wider community to share their health experiences and progress through social networks. It is a platform for creating awareness, offering emotional support, and room for connecting with many other patients.

Patient education & engagement systems – these are platforms designed to guide patients using advanced engagement tools and offering guidelines and instructions based on patient needs. Such a platform has personalized health data, reliable teaching materials, monitoring tools for better health, and decision support tools for improved decision-making approaches.

Top Benefits of Patient Engagement Software

So, why develop a patient engagement software solution? The advantages of patient engagement software solutions do not only lie in streamlining communication. Below are other major advantages of developing such a platform benefiting both healthcare providers and patients:

• Improved communication

Through the patient engagement software solution, patients get to contact and communicate with healthcare providers in a seamless manner. Besides, many patients are already leveraging digital tools to access better healthcare through such apps. Medical practitioners, on the other hand, can communicate with patients, understand their health concerns, and advice on the appropriate medication. Of course, streamlined communication creates awareness, which creates an all-round healthy community.

• Patient satisfaction

Patient engagement platforms offer a perfect solution for patients seeking medical services. Through such a platform, it becomes easy for patients to monitor and manage their health generally, thus enhancing patient satisfaction.

Through such software solutions, patients can easily access their health records, get informed through informative content and advice, and schedule appointments easily at their convenience.

• Patient loyalty and maximized revenue

Through a patient engagement platform, healthcare providers get to create a long-term relationship with the patients. By following up on patients’ well-being and offering informative insight on how to improve their health, patients get connected for the long term, thus creating loyalty. Of course, patients who are already engaged through such a platform are likely to return and recommend the services to others, thus generating more revenue.

• Reduced operational costs

A patient engagement software solution eliminates some unnecessary costs while motivating patients to follow up on their health requirements. For instance, patients don’t need to spend travelling to healthcare facilities and spending transport expenses. What’s more, healthcare providers don’t necessarily need to keep a huge healthcare facility with many staff handling different tasks. They can all connect, engage, and stay informed through patient engagement software, which improves overall efficiency.

• Better health results

Patient engagement systems encourage patients to monitor and adhere to treatment plans as advised by medical practitioners.

Apart from just streamlining the processes, these systems have educational materials and resources that keep patients informed on handling some health issues, thus enhancing better healthcare results.

What’s more, such platforms have advanced tools that help patients monitor and track their overall health status, observe & follow their treatment plans, and make valuable decisions that will boost their overall well-being.

• Minimized no-show rates

It is common for patients to miss scheduled appointments, and this can impact their well-being negatively. However, with a patient engagement software solution, it becomes easy for patients to track their scheduled appointments and plan appropriately, ensuring they don’t miss.

What’s more, such a platform enables patients to analyze the available slots and schedule the appointments at their convenient timelines, ensuring they don’t miss. Integrated with advanced communication tools, such platforms can send reminders to patients and give them the option to confirm, withdraw, or reschedule the appointment. This whole process creates a streamlined workflow, ensuring maximum use of resources.

• Streamlined workflows

Patient engagement software is perfect when it comes to streamlining operations and processes. Some common tasks that can be automated with such a system include billing, personalized patient education, and appointment reminders. All these tasks are effective in facilitating better healthcare services.

In this case, healthcare providers don’t need to execute the tasks manually but focus more on service delivery to patients; what’s more, there is less or no paperwork at all, thus creating an organized and streamlined working environment.

• Increased productivity

There are many ways through which a patient engagement platform increases productivity. For instance, the platform offers reliable communication features for productive communication between patients and medical practitioners. What’s more, such systems offer reliable engagement features such as appointment reminders, which motivate patients to track their health progress and embrace healthy living standards. Above all, it is easy to check and fill up the available slots for appointments, ensuring all the time is covered for increased productivity.

• Personalization

Personalization is one important aspect of the healthcare industry. Different patients have different medical requirements, hence the need to deliver personalized healthcare services. A patient engagement software solution is a great way of enabling healthcare providers to deliver customized and personalized services to individual patients.

What’s more, personalization promotes customer loyalty and satisfaction, which boosts productivity in different aspects.

Must have features of a patient engagement software solution

While there are different types of patient engagement software solutions, it is important to note that the goal of such systems is to keep patients engaged while ensuring seamless service delivery. The following are the must-have features of patient engagement software solutions, despite the type of platform you are building:

• Interactive real-time communication

Communication is vital in patient engagement software. The communication should be secure, interactive, and readily available throughout. Include an instant messaging feature and a section to connect to the doctor to enhance efficiency.

• Medication reminders

As a way of ensuring patients follow their medication properly, include a medication reminder feature to facilitate active medication plans. Of course, many patients often miss or forget about their scheduled prescriptions, and this can impact their health progress.

With medication reminders, patients won’t miss their dosage since the features send timely reminders and follow-ups, keeping the patient on their toes.

• Appointment scheduling

This feature facilitates the process of scheduling, canceling, and rescheduling appointments to enhance service delivery.

Through this feature, the platform users can register by themselves, check-in, follow updates, register new patients, and send appointment reminders, among other tasks. Make sure the feature has a section prompting users to leave a review after completing the tasks.

• Telehealth and virtual waiting rooms

Telehealth and virtual waiting rooms help patients notify their healthcare providers of their upcoming appointments so that they can get the appointment through the app. This feature acts like the physical waiting rooms in healthcare facilities where patients wait before they can be attended to by healthcare providers. Adding this feature helps medical practitioners plan and manage their patients well.

• Health record access

Again, patient engagement software should have easy access to their medical health records from anywhere and anytime to perform the required action.

Through such a feature, patients can track their medical status, review the results, and share the test results with medical practitioners. Besides, such medical records help healthcare providers track the progress of patients’ well-being and plan for proper treatment plans to reinforce a better, healthy community.

• Online payments

The online payment feature on the patient engagement software solution helps process all the payments, including sending electronic invoices. Through this feature, patients can complete their payments through different payment methods, track their expenses, and manage repetitive payments.

• Tools for patient education

As part of keeping patients engaged, it is vital to include educational and informative content in the patient engagement software. The content should be accessible in different formats, allowing easy access by different patients.

Also, patients should use such tools to ask some questions, and get answers to their research and concerns. As a way of ensuring the platform is active and highly interactive, integrate virtual assistants or chatbots to keep patients engaged all the time.

Most importantly, include interactive elements such as gamification where patients can add members and interact with one another through gaming. Use user feedback and regular surveys to improve the platform’s performance and functionality.

• Integrations with other solutions

Integrate the patient engagement software solution with other systems for advanced service delivery and overall performance. CRM and EHR, for instance, are integrations that will enhance the functionality of your patient engagement software solution.

Step-by-step patient engagement software development process

Patient engagement software development is a complex process that requires experts who can plan and execute the processes in a professional manner. Below are steps to follow to ensure you build patient engagement software successfully:

• Research and conceptualization

Start the process by doing quick research and identifying the missing gaps in the market. With many patient engagement software solutions already available, you need to research and verify the viability of your idea before you start investing in the project.

During this phase, identify the needs and wants of patients and medical practitioners (the platform users). From the insights collected, you can then identify gaps and come up with an idea that will help you fill the gap.

After you have your idea, you will need to validate it. This involves collecting feedback and insights from teams (stakeholders and software users). This is a group that will help you refine the idea, ensuring the final product aligns with customer expectations and for easy market penetration.

Most importantly, involve industry experts in this stage to create a collective working environment from the early stages of patient engagement software development.

• Define the platform users

With the ideation complete, you need to evaluate your end users. Of course, you are dealing with patients and healthcare providers in this case. However, are you targeting a specific audience? It can be patients with chronic illness or any subset of patients who need diverse medical services.

This step is vital as it will help you connect with real platform users, thus designing and creating a platform that will meet their needs and wants. You will be able to define the features and functionalities that align with the target audience.

As you complete this phase, connect with an expert UX designer, especially in the healthcare field to get ideas and concepts of how to structure and design the platform, including the colors, typography, fonts, and related elements. What’s more, you will be able to define appropriate technologies and approaches to use to bring out a perfect patient engagement software solution.

• Assemble your development team

At this point, you have a clear overview of how you need your patient engagement software to look. As a result, you can define the technologies and approaches to use to achieve your goal.

The final team should have all the experts required to complete the entire project. For instance, you will need project managers, designers, developers, and testers who understand the dynamics of healthcare digital solutions.

You can simplify this step by outsourcing from healthcare software development company Aalpha Information Systems, where you will get all the needed team members under one roof. You will also save on costs when you outsource your software development project to the Aalpha team.

• MVP development

Developing an MVP first will help you save on costs and resources, ensuring you produce a product that aligns with what end users need, thus seamless market penetration.

The MVP, in this case, is a simple version of the software solution you want to build. It will help you collect early user feedback and modify the software solution where appropriate.

Again, since the healthcare requirements keep changing from time to time, building healthcare MVP first will ensure you follow best practices, use the right tools & technologies, and produce a software solution that meets the set industry rules and regulations.

Most importantly, integrate the software solution with other systems to enhance its service delivery. In every step, factor in advanced security measures to ensure you produce a secure and safe software solution that won’t compromise user data.

• Testing

With the patient engagement software solution development process complete, you don’t launch immediately. Perform several tests to verify that all features and functionalities work just perfectly.

The testing should include user experience, features functionalities, any bugs or issues with the system, compatibility issues, and collecting user feedback. After testing, adjust and modify the system where needed.

• Software deployment & regular maintenance

After testing and verifying everything is perfect, you can now deploy the software solution and make it available to end users.

Once you launch or deploy the software, its crucial to keep monitoring and upgrading the system where necessary. Active maintenance is important, especially in ensuring the security of the system, updating the system according to emerging technologies & trends, updating the system to align with updated laws & regulations, and updating new features to meet emerging user needs.

Conclusion

Patient engagement software is a reliable digital solution in the healthcare industry. Through such a platform, patients get informed and educated on different aspects. Healthcare providers, on the other hand, get a chance to deliver the best services to patients, thus fostering a healthy community.

It is evident that developing such a system comes with lots of benefits. However, there are some challenges, such as data security, regulatory compliance, cost implications, privacy concerns, and medical staff resistance, among many other challenges. However, with proper plans, resources, and strategies, it becomes easy to develop and implement a patient engagement software solution.

Patient engagement software development FAQs

What is the cost of developing a patient engagement software solution?

The cost of developing a patient engagement software solution varies widely based on a number of reasons. For instance, the type of patient engagement software, complexity, integrations, type of development team, maintenance requirements, location of the development team, and technologies used are examples of factors contributing to the costs of developing such an app.

However, the costs of building a patient engagement software solution could range between $100,000 and $500,000 or even more, based on the factors mentioned in this guide.

Are there some challenges to expect when developing patient engagement software?

Yes, developing patient engagement software comes with benefits and challenges as well. Some of the challenges and their solutions include the following:

• User resistance – not all users will feel comfortable adopting the use of patient engagement software solutions for streamlined services due to a number of reasons. For instance, a lack of good internet access can limit some users from adopting such technologies. Again, some patients may simply resist such solutions, especially older patients, because of the fear of technology factor. Some healthcare providers, too, may resist such solutions, especially when they find it challenging to use for the first time.

Solution: make sure you offer proper training to the targeted user base (both patients and healthcare providers) beforehand to create awareness.

• Privacy concerns – a patient engagement software solution holds user data, including health records, that can be confidential.

Solution: prioritize data security and use vendors that comply with the set rules and guidelines. Again, avoid using ready-made solutions as they are vulnerable to attacks and data leakages.

• Costs – developing a patient engagement software solution can be costly, especially when the platform is a bit complex.

Solution: take time to plan the budget appropriately before you initiate the project. Also, consider outsourcing development services from software development companies like Aalpha and save on extra costs. Most importantly, prioritize the key features to avoid spending resources on irrelevant features. Finally, building an MVP first will ensure you tailor your software according to user needs and for easy market penetration.

What are the best technologies used in patient engagement software development?

There are many advanced technologies you can consider when developing patient engagement software solutions. For instance, cloud computing, data analytics, machine learning, mobile applications, artificial intelligence, and blockchain technologies will streamline the patient engagement development processes while ensuring scalability for future demands.

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