Effective communication is an integral part of quality patient care. Healthcare organisations communicate regularly with patients to make and confirm appointments, provide test results and more. Each communication must reach the right patient at the right time. However, with a range of digital ways to make contact, there are now multiple channels to manage to deliver documents.
Accuracy and co-ordination are essential. The sheer scale is astounding, with hospitals, GP surgeries and a wide range of private healthcare providers all communicating with patients on a regular basis. In addition, healthcare providers such as hospitals and GPs communicate with each other on patient test results and other matters.
The move to digital
Increasingly, digital channels provide a convenient route through, and lockdown accelerated take-up of these in healthcare. Indeed, a survey of UK adults by the Health Foundation found that 97 per cent had used technology in some way to communicate with the NHS between March and October 2020. While phone communication predominates in those technologies, one in five (21 per cent) reported communicating with a healthcare professional by email, text or app while 20 per cent booked an appointment online and 12 per cent accessed their care record electronically.
If they are to succeed in getting their message across, healthcare organisations must manage patient communications effectively. Processes must be in place to ensure that correct information feeds message content and distribution. In this, organisations face five tough challenges:
- Multiple departments communicating
Often, multiple departments have information to give to the same patient. If they all communicate separately, there is a wasteful and avoidable duplication of effort. What’s more, unnecessary confusion can arise if a patient can’t be sure which communication is the latest or, worse still, if they receive conflicting messages.
Centralising communications addresses both issues by co-ordinating message creation and distribution. Providing a clear record of what was sent, to whom and when.
Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board sends out around 3.5 million letters a year. It found that managing this mail volume manually was labour-intensive, there was no traceability, and 2nd Class mail could take up to seven days to reach patients. It succeeded in centralising outgoing mail through a digital mailroom to improve efficiency and productivity, generating cost savings. The end result saw an up-to-date postal system supporting the patient experience with traceability of communications.
- Digital communications
Patients increasingly expect emails, texts or access to an online patient portal where they can view messages and take action. One channel may be used for one message type and a different one for another. A range of reasons may sit behind which channel is chosen. Patient preference plays a big part, but so too does cost, speed and message fit. Appointment confirmations and reminders may be sent very successfully by text, but the length of a consultant’s report makes that channel unsuited to that communication. In that case, a letter by post is a better fit.
However, adding communications channels without any form of automation is sure to negatively impact the workload of healthcare staff. Central co-ordination of communications channels, together with patient preferences on how to be contacted, ensures an efficient process.
- Scalability
All regular processes must be capable of scaling to accommodate occasional higher throughput and to ramp up permanently should that be required. Manual ways of creating, co-ordinating and issuing communications makes scaling a difficult thing to do.
A communications management platform can expedite the scaling up of output without the addition of more resource which, in the face of constrained budgets, is not always possible.
- Data management
Every healthcare organisation must manage data, including patient contact details, in such a way that it is kept up-to-date and is controlled. The most effective way of ensuring this is by centralising communications to draw on a managed data set.
Separate management of communications, or of channels, risks inconsistencies creeping in. That could result in messages not reaching patients or arriving late.
- Sensitive information
Healthcare data is among the most sensitive and personal information that organisations must manage. Strict controls must ensure that communications go to the correct patients, as failing to do so could be a significant breach of data privacy regulations.
Technology can provide assurance that each document goes into the right envelope, along with a digital record of which communication went where for a valuable audit trail.
A single platform to manage communications
A communications management solution centralises patient communications and streamlines activities. It brings together data, such as patient contact details and channel preferences, and messages, such as letters or appointment reminders, and passes final communications to preferred channels for sending. Many elements of the process, such as addressing, are automated and applied across channels to reduce errors and duplication.
By centralising communications, silos of information and data are removed. That way, the most up to date patient data informs each communication and channel preferences can be met. This helps ensure that important messages are received, read and actioned. To find out more about multi-channel document delivery, take a look at how Quadient can help.
