Attracting new patients can be challenging and costly. And when they leave as fast as they come, things get even tougher.
Our solution: Retain the patients you worked so hard to earn by automating elements of the new patient journey.
Automating the new patient journey helps ensure all new patients have a great first experience, so they’ll be more likely to stick around for the long term. At the same time, automation eases the communication burden on your staff. It’s truly a win-win.
Read on to learn more about the benefits of automation, as well as how we helped one specialty clinic revitalize their new patient journey and implement automation to improve retention.
Automating your patient journey means more timely and personalized communication. And that helps keep patients more engaged.
After all, when patients receive messages that are tailored to them, at just the right time, it not only keeps them informed, but helps them feel seen and respected — and therefore more likely to stay connected with your office.
This goes for both pre-appointment communications and after care: Reminder emails make sure patients know when and where their appointments are; follow-up emails help ensure they stick with their treatment plan.
Speaking of knowing when and where an appointment is … If your office struggles with no-shows, automating your communications can bring big improvements.
Remember, patients are human, and life gets busy. Without a reminder, it’s easy to forget you have an appointment. And while you can certainly send manual reminder emails or make phone calls to remind patients of their appointments, that puts too much burden on your staff.
Automation helps stop no-shows while also freeing up your staff’s time.
In this day and age, generic emails just won’t cut it. Personalizing your communications with your patients is a MUST.
Personalized communication helps keep your patients coming back because it makes them feel seen. Think about it: would you rather go to a clinic that treats you like a number, or one that calls you by name and knows every detail of your patient history? Automation makes personalization easy.
Admin staff overwhelmed? Automation can free up their time while also helping them take better care of your patients.
When critical pieces of the patient journey — like scheduling, appointment reminders, and patient education — are handled with automation, it enables your staff to confidently care for more patients without overburdening them. (And yes, in the end, this can save you the cost of having to hire additional staff.)
All of these things together create a better experience for your patients … which makes them much more likely to stick around.
First, you need to go through your customer journey and determine where there are high and low points — and figure out what changes you need to make to take advantage of the highs and improve the lows. Ask yourself:
You’ll need to harness your empathy here — think about the emotional experience a patient is having throughout this process, and how you can leverage automation to help smooth things out and avoid big dips in the relationship.
If you were the one going through your new patient journey, what would help you move forward, and what would hinder you?
Are there elements of your process that need a human touch? Don’t automate them. Some things are better left in human hands.
Instead, look for the parts of your process that could easily be automated: questions your team is answering over and over again; simple appointment reminders; emails letting them know they have new test results to view, etc.
Automation works best when it’s continually updated. This isn’t a “set-it-and-forget-it” kind of tool. Schedule times throughout the year to review your patient journey, beginning with asking:
👉Want to dive deeper into overhauling your patient journey and determining what to automate? Check out this blog — it’s focused on customers rather than patients, but the main elements still apply.
Now we get to the fun stuff: a real-life example of automating the new patient journey.
Our client, an integrative medicine center, came to us for help improving their onboarding process for new clients. Their existing process was clunky and put a lot of weight on their patient coordinators — they were spending too much time answering the same patient questions over and over again.
The hope was to be more proactive by answering some of these questions in automated email communications so they could continue to support more patients without having to add to their patient coordinator team.
In addition, this client has a unique business model: When a new patient comes on board, they do a lot of diagnostic tests right off the bat. From there, the goal is to have the patient buy into the clinic’s membership program. (They can be seen as a patient with or without membership — but members receive discounted rates and other benefits.)
However, at the time we met with the client, their closing ratio on membership was less than 10%. We knew they could do better. So another goal in updating their new patient journey was to get their patients excited about the prospect of membership.
The first step in automating their onboarding process consisted of a lot of consulting on our part. We helped them:
From there, we also looked at ways to increase the chances a patient would stay with them long-term, as well as ways to help patients stick to their health plan so they could see results. Our client knew that once a patient started seeing results, they would stay … and send more patients their way via referrals.
As I mentioned previously, another goal in optimizing their onboarding process was to encourage more patients to become members and take advantage of the benefits that membership provides. We looked at aspects of their existing process, like timing (When were they asking patients to become members?). And that’s where we found a lot of potential for improvement.
A patient’s initial appointments with this clinic are pretty overwhelming. During the first couple of weeks they have several diagnostic tests done, after which they meet with their doctor or nurse practitioner to go through their results and the recommended treatment plan. At this point, you can imagine the patient’s head is swimming with information overload! And this was when the clinic would ask them to become members.
This is what is so helpful about taking the time to go over your existing new patient journey: it gives you the opportunity to see the best places for improvement. In this case, we recommended they adjust when they ask about membership to a time that’s less overwhelming for the patient.
This clinic also had a high percentage of people who were falling off of their treatment plans. In many cases, this was simply because they got overwhelmed … and after a while, they would feel guilty for not sticking with their plan and would hesitate to reach out to the clinic.
So this was another piece we incorporated into their automated communications: encouraging patients to stick with their plans or to start again if they had fallen off of the plan — while making it as simple as possible for them to stay on track.
In that vein, one thing we explored was sending a recap video after their initial appointment, where the doctor would acknowledge how overwhelming that initial visit can be and offer a few quick wins for them to focus on.
Finally, we talked through a couple of communication issues, such as ensuring patients knew who to call and when, and determining how to communicate different kinds of information (via email, in person, etc.). Directing that flow of communication was key.
At the time, we couldn't send any patient data through HubSpot (the CRM most of their email communications were going through), because all patient and health-related data needs to be encrypted for HIPAA purposes*. Those messages had to go through a different communication channel used specifically for health records.
So, for example, a patient might get an email from that tool saying “Your test results are in, and x result is abnormal.” And of course they’d be stressed about that! Those messages were a trigger for a lot of panicked phone calls.
To counteract that panic, it was important to include calming messaging — i.e., “If your test results include an abnormal reading, don't panic! If it’s something urgent we'll call you — otherwise, we’ll discuss your results in your upcoming appointment.” Something to assure the patient that the clinic was keeping an eye on things and would provide further communication when necessary.
*Note: HubSpot does have HIPAA compliance built in — but you have to have the right type of HubSpot account to utilize it. And that has changed recently: You used to have to buy the Enterprise level in order to send HIPAA-compliant emails, but now they've changed it so you only need to get one Enterprise seat. So, for example, you could have a Marketing Pro account with one seat of Enterprise.
Whether you’re looking at automating the new patient journey through HubSpot or simply want to ensure you have a solid process in place, I can help. As a fractional CMO, this is one of many things I help my clients do every day!
Simply schedule a discovery call to discuss your needs and start on the path toward creating a better experience for your patients … and improving retention for your clinic!