Author: SQHealth-admin

In an effort to standardize healthcare evaluations for patients with limited medical experience, Healthgrades hospital rankings outline the strengths and weaknesses of facilities across the country. While rankings aren’t everything, how your facility is perceived can be extremely influential to the community around you. When you’re seeking solutions that can position you in the best possible light, patient management can be a crucial and often overlooked component. By providing a more thorough look into your management approach, patient care and retention practices, and adherence to quality regulations, it’s possible to leverage your strengths, improve weaknesses, and boost overall reputation.

The Importance of Hospital Rankings

Objectively evaluating hospitals is a loaded task, especially with the differences from facility to facility. Many organizations, like U.S. News and World Report, attempt to provide comprehensive overviews, but all rankings apply slightly different methodologies that can influence patient perceptions. Healthgrade ranks hospitals based on a wide variety of standards and services, including patient reviews, hospital quality awards, clinical quality awards, patient safety ratings, and physician performance. The addition of patient feedback in the ratings process is especially influential; this provides relatable information to patients while also offering healthcare facilities criticism that otherwise may have gone ignored.

The Art of Attracting Patients

In a competitive market like healthcare, the smallest details can make the largest difference. Your approach to patient care and organization can be critical here, offering you an opportunity to streamline operations and stand apart from the crowd. Through a new approach and a better perspective on patient satisfaction, your facility can make the decisions necessary to improve both rankings and results. Guideway Care clients are able to better attract patients through our digital marketing services, manage admissions, regulate care, and retain patients so they keep coming back. Two successful Sequence facilities, Centura Health and Alexian Brothers, are both highly ranked as top hospitals in their respective states, demonstrating a track record of educated management coupled with success-oriented goals.

Making a Difference with Sequence

In non-emergency situations, it is up to the patient to determine which healthcare facility is the proper choice. In a world where patients seek online reviews prior to making a decision about which hospital to utilize, hospital rankings are now more than ever important. When your hospital needs a way to boost rankings and serve more members of the community, Sequence Patient Tracking can assist in interpreting ranking data to achieve meaningful, successful results. We track patients from their first contact, whether an online contact form or a phone call, tracking them as they work through surgical pre-requisites, insurance verification, through their postoperative recovery to ensure they receive full support from your organization to provide them with a satisfying experience. In addition, Sequence provides you with real time monitoring and tracking of the patient through the use of a HIPAA-approved software platform. When you’d like to attract more patients and improve your reputation, both locally and nationally, Guideway Care can provide the solutions needed to achieve your goals. Contact us at 888-986-3638 to learn more about our patient tracking software or request a demo to see what our team can do to assist in increasing your hospital rankings.

Salesforce Connections 2016 (#cnx16) is in the books! Three exciting days at Atlanta’s Georgia World Congress Center set the stage for phenomenal networking, ideating, and market research around trends in what is now the evolving world of customer experience and relationship management. This inclusive, outcomes-driven approach to what was one time the segmented industries of marketing, advertising, public relations, sales, and customer service echoes the sentiments of leaders in the healthcare industry as consumers continue to expect quality outcomes and value-based care. Rising Digital Expectations: Personalizing the Entire Patient Journey “It’s a good thing to be forced to be innovative.” – Avice Meehan, Senior VP, Chief Communications Officer, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Highlighting the growing expectations of healthcare consumers for a personalized one-to-one patient journey, this breakout session focused on ways healthcare providers are addressing regulatory and data challenges while improving cross-channel digital communications to improve patient satisfaction, and to drive patient acquisition and engagement while creating lifetime advocacy. Jessica Sweeney-Platt shared with the group, “Hospital and health system executives recognize that health care is not immune to digital disruption; the rude awakening has been that the disruption is happening faster than they can respond to it.” Doug Weiss, Chief Marketing Officer at Eating Recovery Center, further highlighted the MDnetSolutions value proposition, “It’s before and after care where a big opportunity exists. Education to support families and providers can improve the customer experience and enhance the quality of care.” MDnetSolutions Can Address Opportunities to Improve the Personalized Patient Journey

1. Configurable cloud technology is a competitive advantage in how the patients are acquired, engaged, and retained
2. The patient experience should be seamless, offering a single experience with the entire care team empowered by constant, transparent communication and efficient relationship management; interoperability is key
3. Providers have a real need for a holistic view of each patient and of their practice
4. New industry thinking: Don’t build systems to solve problems, build relationships and put people and data in context
5. Education and technology should set expectations and monitor adherence throughout the patient’s journey; managing expectations allows you to manage outcomes
6. Provide the right information at the right time to inspire engagement/action
7. Surprise and delight the client so they can surprise and delight the patient

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See more news and notes from #CNX16 by visiting our social media sites and joining the conversation. For more insight into industry trends and how MDnetSolutions is addressing the immediate needs of providers across the healthcare industry, call today and ask for a product demo. 888.986.3638

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Kris Altiere, Director of Marketing & Creative As our Director of Marketing & Creative, Kris is chief architect of our creative services and manages our marketing, design, video and production teams. She has more than 15 years’ experience in creative leadership and design, and has worked with prestigious clients including Cleveland Clinic, New York Presbyterian, Baptist Health South Florida, Emory Healthcare, St. Joseph’s Hospital and Piedmont Hospital. Before joining us, she worked at AVID Design as a Senior Designer, Marketing Manager and Web Consultant. Kris earned a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design from Kennesaw State University. She also attended Auburn University.

To launch our ongoing Leader’s Thought blog series, this post is written by Alan Creighton — communications mogul turned CEO of MDnetSolutions.

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It’s no secret that consumers are embracing and adopting new technologies and communication tools at an unprecedented rate. Within the telecom industry, the demand for asynchronous engagement — “what I want, when and where I want it” — has exploded, and telecom providers have delivered. With applications for a multitude of devices, the industry has set the bar for communication preferences and enabled consumer brands to have this kind of conversation

And this is where the healthcare industry has fallen behind.

While numerous studies that have indicated that patient engagement improves healthcare outcomes, the healthcare industry as whole has not addressed the changes in communication preferences that consumers, their patients, expect. Yes, brick-and-mortar practices have developed patient portals; but they primarily serve as one-way information aggregators within that practice. It’s the lack of outgoing communication from providers and the ability to consume patient information outside of the brick and mortar that is affecting how active a role patients take in managing their own health. With consumers far ahead of providers and squarely in a highly-engaged phase, this new generation of “consumer patients” is frustrated that they can’t have more communication with their providers when and where they want to receive it. Where telecom technologies have evolved to allow brands to keep up with consumer demand, the CRM technology supporting healthcare practices has remained largely stagnant. In order to thrive, practices must begin to explore the benefits of digital dialogue throughout the patient care continuum and outside the of the typical healthcare setting, particularly with post-discharge follow-up. By enabling dialogue, practices can efficiently and effectively utilize tools of engagement to help their patients lead healthier lives.

So what have we learned?

For healthcare to succeed in the “consumer patient” generation, integration and interoperability among healthcare IT applications are crucial. Because very few healthcare vendors have fully embraced this, the standards and protocols are lacking when it comes to sharing data and exchanging information. This, too, creates a deficiency when transferring patient data and results in an inefficient, frustrating experience.

How do we help improve that experience?

One, we have to communicate outside of the healthcare setting with methods that patients, our “consumers”, are most comfortable and most responsive. Two, the healthcare industry must work together to do a better job of sharing information in order to stay effective and relevant. Simply put, healthcare practices that choose not integrate choose to become obsolete. The need for that communication has primed healthcare data to become part of an information system that empowers and educates patients. There is a huge opportunity in the market to utilize the tools of engagement that we know patients, our consumers, have adopted from other consumer brands. Companies that have tuned into this opportunity are beginning to introduce tools that are driven by communication preferences and designed to integrate with existing EMR systems. By adapting their preferred methods of information exchange, healthcare providers can now offer a more-relevant dialogue to better engage with their patients. About MDnetSolutions: We are leveraging communication innovations, and structuring our software for integration, to facilitate conversations between healthcare providers and patients. By creating tools that provide a multi-level view of the patient pathway, and integrate with EMRs, we can also keep a practice’s staff informed of where each patient is within in the provider’s healthcare continuum to prevent them from stalling in their cycle of care. Learn more about these solutions at www.mdnetsolutions.com