3 Salesforce Communication Features to Improve the Patient Experience

As the business of healthcare shifts from volume-based to value-based, providers are finding that patient loyalty can be hard to come by. Interestingly, however, it isn’t just the value of the services offered that influence patient loyalty. 

The entire patient experience - which encompasses everything from contact for a first appointment to paying bills - influences whether patients will return to the same provider or hospital. And one of the leading indicators of patient loyalty is communication, and that loyalty can extend beyond the provider to affiliated facilities, like hospitals.  

While it’s clear that communication is a critical element of the patient experience, it can be challenging for a provider to come up with ways beyond the traditional to support and encourage that communication. Reminder postcards and follow-up calls are great, but there is so much more that providers could be doing to support a strong patient experience.  

Some of the challenges to creating a more robust patient communication plan are time and money. The amount of staff needed to provide personalized communication that patients demand would bury many healthcare providers. Instead, physician’s offices, clinics, hospitals, and other providers need better, more sophisticated tools that promote interactions with patients without burdening overworked office and healthcare staff. 

This is where Salesforce comes in. With a broad range of tools and the ability to integrate with more, Salesforce can elevate a provider’s communication plans beyond reminders or marketing emails. Here are just a few ways that the platform can advance your communications and provide more personalized and satisfying support for the patient experience. 

3 Communication Features in Salesforce that Improve the Patient Experience 

LiveMessage 

The LiveMessage feature on the Salesforce platform opens up communication channels with patients, removing barriers to questions and eliminating confusion or hesitation by offering access from the patient’s chosen device at any time. 

This is more than a text message reminder for an appointment. Staff can engage with patients via SMS as part of the Service Cloud offering, answering questions, checking in post-appointment, and providing support.  

What’s important to note is that LiveMessage offers a single windowpane for patient interaction since LiveMessage is part of the relationship platform that holds other patient data. Staff can access patient information and previous communication history to provide context around any communication, making these interactions more personalized, consistent, and tailored to the patient. Plus, routing and initial communication can be serviced by a chatbot to ensure patients can quickly chat with the right staff member. 

Patient Journey Builder 

Within Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud is a tool known as the Journey Builder. While not a direct communication tool on its own, Journey Builder is a powerful tool that can orchestrate touchpoints across patient interactions, provide guidance, and automate elements of the patient journey. 

The tool lets providers define a care path for patients using a drag-and-drop interface. Then patient-activated triggers and behavior dynamically alter the path as needed. Journey touchpoints can be configured and managed across digital channels, from text to push notifications to email. Interactions can be automated to ensure patients receive timely responses to engagement activities, like website visits and email opens. 

Patient journeys can be evaluated, tested, and optimized to ensure the best experience. Paths can be adapted to suit patient needs and behaviors better, while predictive analytics can be leveraged to deliver timely, even personalized information. 

Because Journey Builder is easy to use and adaptive, providers can cover a range of patient needs from treatment or intervention aftercare to well-child information and milestones to progressive information for optimal health, diet, or condition management. 

Health Cloud Assessments 

Patient communication isn’t just about responding to the patient. It can be an integral part of providing a higher quality of care, better service, and even eliminating care gaps.  

Salesforce’s Health Cloud includes the ability to offer digital assessments that deliver everything from collecting feedback to gathering pre-procedure information to monitoring and following up with aftercare assessments. 

Combined with clinical data, Health Cloud Assessments become a powerful enabler of enhanced patient care. For instance, a follow-up assessment could be used with a post-operative patient to verify instructions are being followed and that, if needed, interventions can happen quickly. If a patient’s pain levels increase post-op, clinic staff can initiate contact with a patient to assist instead of having the patient assume that the issue will get better over time.  

The clinician can view the patient’s medical information against assessment responses and determine if action is necessary. Even better, staff can review all assessment and survey responses for a patient to get a complete picture of the patient’s needs and progress. These assessments can also gather information for clinical trials or gain insight into potential improvements in the patient experience. 

Conclusion 

Using communication to improve the patient experience isn’t about more; it’s about better. Better quality, more personalized, and more accessible communication help patients to be more engaged with their own care and on the path to better health outcomes. Multiple facets of the Salesforce platform can enable more robust and yet more streamlined communications between provider and patient. 

Are you looking to improve your patients’ experiences, and with it increase patient loyalty, engagement, and profitability? Contact us today for a consultation on what a CRM platform, purpose-built for healthcare, can do for your business. Six Consulting can help your practice, hospital, clinic, research facility, or pharmaceutical company implement and customize Salesforce to achieve more while assisting patients in progressing toward optimum health.