How to include online health portals in hospital marketing activities?

As patients expect timely access to their healthcare information from where they are, the demand for Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Electronic Health Records (HER) have increased significantly. It is evident in the surge of patient portal applications in recent years.

A Patient Portal is a secured web platform where individuals can access information about their health, treatments, and updates from their doctors.

By simply logging in to a patient portal, an individual can get 24-hour access to electronic health information like in-office visits, lab results, medications, discharge summaries, etc. Moreover, web patient portals have sophisticated features like making payments, messaging a doctor, scheduling appointments, etc.

Since the craze for patient portals has constantly increased, medical marketers advise doctors of all specialties and hospitals of all sizes to incorporate the web application in their healthcare branding activities.

How do patient online portals benefit healthcare professionals?

Aside from patients, patient portal software like Athenaone, Carepaths EHR, EHRZip, and other similar products are also loved by doctors, hospital staff, and lab technicians. The reasons are here:

• Streamlined Workflow – Hospital staffs know how hard to manage the countless number of calls regarding doctor appointments and clinical visits made by patients. The online patient portals allow people to schedule their appointments online, reducing the need to call hospitals. Hence staff and nurses can save time and enjoy a streamlined workflow.
• Improves clinical efficiency – The features of online payment, online check-ins, and downloading lab reports educating patients have simplified and improvise administrative activities like billing, communication, and providing data solutions to a great extent.
• Enhanced patient engagement – People prefer accessing everything in one location in this internet age. As a plethora of health information is readily available in online patient portals and options like prescription refills, it will cater to the patient’s needs. It implies that the portals can improve how patients and clinicians interact.
• Patient Education – The patient portals allow healthcare providers to share answers to frequently asked questions in their specialty. It gives patients a general idea of how to care for and treat themselves and information on their bodily disorders.

Many clinicians admitted that the continual availability of health information and educational resources via patient portals had caused some psychobehavioral changes in people’s minds towards their health. Some instances include self-efficacy, medication awareness, and using preventive services.

As these online portals guarantee improved patient engagement rates, hospital marketers also insist healthcare organizations incorporate this for their online branding activities.

How to include online health portals in healthcare digital marketing activities?

Besides helping existing patients exceptionally, web patient portals are also helpful in attracting new patients if they are implemented effectively in healthcare marketing activities.

1) Collect the Email addresses of your patients

As healthcare portals are emerging trends, many people are reluctant to adopt such patient portals. Hence a practitioner can use it to recommend the benefits of using patient portals.

The first step of this is to collect the email addresses of patients.

Whether it is regular patients or new patients, use strategies like asking for their contact details, such as phone numbers and email Ids, while making registration during their clinical visits.

Then send a mail series to the patients explaining the features of the patient portal. It will showcase how well a doctor is upgraded in technical advancements. Right?

2) Create Autoresponder Email Series

Start sending autoresponder emails that carry essential information to answer people’s questions about patient portals. Make sure that the emails contain the following elements:

• Benefits of patient portals
• Step-by-step instructions on how to use the portal
• Add things that portray the robustness of those portals
• Add relevant images

Don’t try to cover too much information in one mail. Likewise, the email should be written in simple language for better understanding.

3) Give a link to the portal from your hospital website

As discussed earlier, many patients are not aware of such healthcare portals. It indicates that they are completely unaware of where to find patient portals. Hence it is better to provide a link to such e-healthcare web portals from your healthcare website.

Ensure the link is placed appropriately on web pages so visitors won’t have to scroll down to find the patient portal software.

4) Social Media Branding activities

Similar to Email Marketing, sharing information about web patient portals on social media sites is also necessary. To be precise, many people learned about the patient portals you utilize through your social media pages.

Write an in-depth blog post about the portal and publish it on your website.

Share infographics that showcase the advantages of healthcare portals.

Create videos that explain the benefits & challenges of using the portal and how to use it and get them published on your social media pages.

Bottom line

Providing 24/7 access to medical information is inevitable in today’s healthcare scenario. Patient portals are the right choices for those wanting online healthcare information access. Hence many reputed healthcare organizations have incorporated such web portals into their practice.

If you pick up the right e-healthcare web portal and brand them accordingly, you can grab the attention of many online users and make them visit your clinic easily.