The point of care is a highly valuable setting for delivering educational health content and materials that can enhance patient-provider interactions, which ultimately helps to improve patients’ overall experience and the quality of their care.
But in many cases, their experience in the waiting room just before their clinical encounter can be almost as crucial to their healthcare journey as their experience during their appointment—and it’s something pharma marketers need to think about if they hope to reach patients with point-of-care messaging. After all, the viewability of that content hinges on patients coming into the office—or visiting an office virtually, in the case of telehealth appointments—and that’s something patients are more likely to continue to do if they have a good in-office experience.
Luckily, technology has continued to transform that experience for the better in recent years, with the COVID-19 pandemic hastening providers’ adoption of consumer-friendly tools that can deliver a more flexible, convenient, and personalized experience for patients.
The Tools and Tech Improving Patient Visits to the Doctor
Provider organizations are increasingly implementing tools such as digital check-in, flexible patient payments, and clinical screening that can reduce wait times, cut down on duplicated efforts, and sensitively address patients’ private health concerns. And most importantly, they can offer patients a modern, inclusive healthcare experience in line with what they experience in other areas of their lives, whether that’s making a restaurant reservation online or using their phone to check in for a flight.
Another benefit of improved point-of-care workflows? Since providers are spending less time on manual administrative tasks, they can spend more time on delivering care and enhancing the patient experience. Innovations in appointment scheduling also now allow providers to optimize their calendars, which in turn can help more patients get the treatment they need.
With so many aspects of patients’ lives moving online over the last couple of years, it’s technologies like these that can deliver the type of experience that consumers have come to expect. Choosing vendors who can not only deliver media, but also improve the in-office environment has real implications for patients’ health and will set them up to benefit from the critical health content that point-of-care marketers have to offer.
