Are Mobile Apps A Part Of Your Patient Retention Strategies?

You never want to lose a patient. But you especially don’t want to lose a patient because a competitor did their job better than you. Healthcare organizations of all sizes are adding mobile applications to their patient retention strategies to get an edge on the competition. 

The need to use healthcare technology that seamlessly fits into your patient’s daily lives is greater than ever before. Organizations now use apps that can be accessed directly from a patient’s smartphone. These apps range in capabilities from tracking health data to paying bills. Whatever the use case, the most important thing to keep in mind is how the app is incorporated in your patient retention strategies.

How To Use Mobile Health Apps In Your Patient Collection Strategies

If you’re adding a mobile health app to your patient collection strategies (and you should), here are some things you need to keep in mind:

User Experience 

Any patient-facing technology should first and foremost be easy to use. Complicated instructions will immediately turn any user off. Optimize the user experience of your app with a simple, modern appearance, easily identifiable navigation buttons, and text and colors that are easy to read. 

Use Case

The use case of your mobile health apps refer to how the patient will use these apps to interact with your practice and their own personal healthcare and financial information. Decide what use case is most valuable or is needed most for your practice and your patients. For example, if you are losing patients because they get frustrated with billing and are confused with what they owe, consider adopting a tool that will allow patients to manage their own healthcare finances. This will save you money by not having to chase down payments, and will save your patients the frustration of trying to figure out what they owe.

Feedback

Obviously we’re not telling you to just adopt some patient-friendly technology and be done with it. You won’t know how effective it is for your patient retention strategies if you don’t ask patients for feedback. The best way to do this is create an anonymous survey using a tool like SurveyMonkey. This way patients feel comfortable giving their honest feedback about how the app is working for them. If you want to incentivize patients even more, give them a $5 Starbucks gift card for completing your survey. Keep your surveys short and to the point to further increase your submissions.

Cost

This is probably a no-brainer, but worth including anyway. Any mobile technology you offer to patients should be free of cost. Patients don’t expect to pay for tools that are meant to help them manage their healthcare experience. And you could actually hurt patient retention if you offer tools that cost patients.

Ongoing Communications

An added benefit to most healthcare apps is the ability to be in almost constant communication with patients. Patients appreciate the convenience of using mobile apps to get in touch with you, review their information, and find solutions to some of their questions. This is also a great platform to push notifications through about upcoming appointments, past due bills, healthcare information specific to the patient, etc. Staying in touch with your patients is essential to retain them. 

Mobile healthcare technology is following the same path that major retail and eCommerce brands once followed when their applications were first introduced. Healthcare apps might be adopted at an even faster pace than their predecessors due to increasingly rapid tech adoption across the world.

Patient retention strategies have evolved to include patient-facing healthcare technology such as mobile health apps. Don’t risk losing patients to your competitors. Decide what technology would be best for your patients and use that to continually engage them in their healthcare experience.