To provide your clients or patients with the best experience possible, it’s important to understand their ‘journey’ with your practice – their ‘patient journey’.
Potential benefits from optimising internal processes and the journey your patients experience include increased patient retention, more word-of-mouth recommendations, and organisational benefits such as greater employee satisfaction, increased productivity and increased profit.
What is the patient journey, and what are the ‘touchpoints’?
The patient journey is the sequential steps and interactions your patients progress through when engaging with your medical practice.
A touchpoint includes every point of contact a person has with your brand and organisation, including everything from a social media post or hearing about your practice through a friend to physically attending an appointment at your practice and every facet of that visit. So, everything from when someone first hears of your business through to post-treatment interactions, such as receiving test results, information sheets or receipts.
Due to the span of the journey, we’ve split this topic into two parts – the patient journey before the appointment and the patient journey during and post-treatment at your practice, identifying touchpoints to be aware of and identifying strategies for improvement.
Where does the pre-appointment patient journey begin and end?
To help you optimise the experience of each touchpoint, you’ll need to assume the perspective of your patients or clients across their journey. Key touchpoints to consider:
How do they hear about your practice: word-of-mouth/Google Business/HotDoc/Whitecoat/Referral/your website/social media? Others? Make sure you know where so you can optimise the content they receive and their interaction.
Ease of finding information – how informative is your website, and is it easily navigated?
Ease of appointment booking – is it easy to book online or by phone? Can they complete their registration online? Do you have a long wait time? Is all the necessary information provided before the appointment?
To analyse touchpoints, it can be helpful to walk through the process yourself or ask someone else to step through the different stages and provide feedback. It’s important to consider all your clientele when doing this, including those who might be less tech-savvy or require different accessibility provisions.
Strategies to improve the pre-appointment patient journey:
Based on your analysis, some simple changes you could make to improve the patient journey include:
1. Optimise your website, ensuring it:
Can be easily navigated.
Has inclusive and understandable language.
Loads and runs quickly – using smaller image files and avoiding complex web effects can help here.
Contains all the information your patients/clients need before their appointment.
2. Optimise the booking process
If you offer online booking services, ensure the process is simple and provides appointment confirmation and/or reminders before the appointment.
If bookings can be made with your admin team, ensure each team member is trained in taking and following all appointment booking steps, and adopt a bright and welcoming tone when engaging with patients.
If new patients can complete their registration online, ensure the information captured flows straight into your clinical software so there’s no chance of typos or information being missed. And enable smooth uploading of referrals, test results, etc., simultaneously.
3. Choose the right clinical software
The quality and type of clinical software you use can significantly impact the patient journey. When selecting your software, it’s important to consider the ways in which this will be the case with each option you’re considering. Check out this article about choosing the right clinical software for your practice.
4. Payment information
Ensure transparency and informed financial consent. Patients need to know the costs of services before they attend their appointments. This ensures they’re in a financial position to pay on the day of their treatment and prevents any surprises of the cost being more than expected.
The cost of your services could be communicated through the appointment confirmation, your website, conversations before the patient’s appointment, or potentially a welcome email. Whatever your chosen method, it must be before the appointment.
It also helps your cashflow if they’re informed that payment is required on the day of service.
5. Provide accessibility information
Transport options, parking and landmarks help those visiting your practice for the first time.
This includes information such as where ramps are in your building or parking options – whatever is relevant to your practice.
This information could be communicated on your website, by phone/by email/text, etc.
6. Seek feedback where possible
Ask your patients for feedback on their experience in person or through surveys – read this article for tips.
Where you’ve changed what your practice does based on feedback received, you might like to communicate this in your newsletter/on social media to demonstrate your commitment to driving improvements.
Retaining clientele is integral to creating a thriving practice, and offering a quality and seamless patient journey plays a part in achieving this. Check out this follow-up article in which we delve into the patient experience during and post-appointment.
The Augmentum team provides a broad range of consultancy and management services, supporting healthcare business owners and decision-makers in many key areas, such as strategy development and action planning, building effective foundations and teams, keeping your finger on the pulse, and driving growth and success.
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