Whether it’s booking a reservation, movie ticket, or rideshare, consumers have increasingly come to rely on digital technologies for efficiency and self-service. Yet from a patient’s perspective, healthcare, which remains in dire need of disruption is anything but efficient and seamless. Overall, digital transformations across sectors have empowered consumers and created better customer experiences while at the same time enhancing brand equity. But the healthcare industry has largely been left out, which has negatively impacted the way patients interface with healthcare organizations and their perceptions of company brand image and competence. 

Healthcare organizations in the market today still lack self-service tools that provide a complete patient engagement platform, and many of the ones that do exist are clunky, single-use, and challenging for organizations to adopt. It’s not uncommon for healthcare companies to have numerous tools for tasks like patient self-scheduling, online bill pay, prescription refill requests, appointment reminders, secure patient messaging, and intake, while often leveraging multiple platforms for the same feature. This inefficient approach to patient engagement is amplified since many of these solutions don’t communicate with one another to build an entire picture of a customer’s journey across digital touchpoints. Such lack of communication hurts an organization’s ability to maximize personalization — something users have come to expect in other industries — creating subpar patient experiences. As a result, this stale method to patient engagement hurts healthcare companies and frequently results in high maintenance and licensing fees to numerous vendors. 

Many organizations are now turning their focus away from single, piece-mealed solutions and instead focusing on a complete patient engagement platform. But is there a product capable of doing this effectively, or should healthcare organizations opt for a custom-built platform? 

While demand exists for a product capable of comprehensive patient engagement that can meet the needs of diverse healthcare organizations, complete solutions are not as readily available. Furthermore, medical and healthcare organizations have differing complexities, workflows, and source systems. External patient portal platforms can serve as a strong solution to patient engagement since these systems can integrate data from multiple sources to build a complete patient profile, allow for customization, and the addition of new and improved features. For instance, Bridge Patient Portal serves as a “single pane of glass” for all of a healthcare organization’s patient engagement needs. Through desktop or mobile, Bridge provides a complete patient engagement platform that offers secure messaging and SMS/email/push notifications, self-scheduling, medical records access, bill pay, prescription refill, in addition to a growing number of user-friendly functionalities. In the background, the platform consolidates, aggregates, and filters data from disparate systems through distinct interface types to provide patients with a quality user experience in real-time that they’ve come to expect.

mHealth platforms also provide solutions to patient engagement, which encompass a set of pre-built features that dramatically speed up a time to market. Since technology and healthcare evolve at a rapid rate, the market demands solutions that can transform and keep pace. For some, a custom-built patient engagement platform may appear more attractive, but organizations should be cautious about creating systems that are unable to scale and adapt to changing business and patient needs.