With the rapid adoption of new-age technologies such as telemedicine, wearable medical devices, AI-enabled medical devices, and blockchain electronic health records, the healthcare industry is yielding a multitude of opportunities.

According to Statista, by 2025, the digital healthcare market is expected to touch $660 Billion. These dollars are being deployed not only to enhance the overall system but also to improve patient outcomes – patient care, systems, improved diagnosis, personalized treatments, or appointment management.

Traditionally, customers have either called or visited a hospital to make an appointment. But it’s 2024, nearly 40 years after the internet revolution, and customers expect more.

As a brand that operates in healthcare, there are numerous opportunities to enhance customer experience – automate your appointment confirmation messages, send out booking reminders, and take feedback. Customers expect a seamless experience from booking to post-appointment and meeting these expectations is essential for satisfaction.

Let’s examine the implementation of personalization in the healthcare sector.

What’s the role of personalization in appointment management?

In the healthcare industry, patient communication via marketing channels like WhatsApp, SMS, or call is crucial for success. When patients feel like they are being recognized as unique individuals with a unique history and circumstances, they appreciate the efforts.

Truth be told, just by mapping out the patient journey healthcare brands can enhance their overall experience, patient satisfaction, loyalty, and repeat usage. Let’s take a quick look at various customer touchpoints:

Staying connected throughout the journey encourages brands to be mindful of every aspect – from the initial need for care to post-treatment follow-up. This includes considering contextual messaging, the optimal timing for reaching out, special offers, and other similar elements. By analyzing the touchpoints, brands can identify key moments that influence loyalty.

Let’s understand the stages of a digitally active patient and where all healthcare brands can intersect.

1. Personalized appointment confirmation

When patients book an appointment, ensure that they receive confirmation messages that call out their name, appointment time, date, address, and other details of the appointment.

This reassures the patient about their booking. Though the examples below are neatly standard, you can also go beyond adding rescheduling or cancellation links to help your customer.

2. Appointment reminders

Patient no-shows are a growing concern for the medical industry, and nearly 37% miss it because they forgot or weren’t reminded, reports TIMIFY. Medical service providers who automate email, SMS, or WhatsApp to remind customers of their appointments can reduce no-shows drastically.

In this message, you can include the date, time, name of the doctor, a brief note if shared, location, and phone number. Furthermore, allowing patients to add it to their calendars on Google or Apple is a huge plus.

3. Waitlist Management

When a slot becomes available due to a cancellation or no-show, healthcare providers can easily allocate it to someone else by implementing a waitlist management system. This is a way of reducing money loss due to no-shows.

Here, the system automatically informs the next person in line through SMS, in-app notifications, or email. One famous example of a brand doing this is Cult. Fit.

4. Retargeting If the Customer Doesn’t Show Up

A patient no-show can disrupt the practice flow, but brands can set up retargeting campaigns and allow customers another opportunity to engage.

You can also use WebEngage’s ‘best channel’ feature that tells you the best channel to reach for each user. This clubbed with ‘send intelligently,’ will help you customize your campaign based on when a user is most likely to engage, resulting in increased conversion.

5. Automating Medical Reports

Implementing document or report automation has often faced resistance from traditional paper-based workflows, leading to operational inefficiencies, errors, and compliance issues. However, medical documentation is time-sensitive and critical to patient care.

To stay relevant, healthcare brands certainly cannot afford delays as patients rely on this information for their health and well-being lest patients seek services elsewhere, where they’re met promptly.

Run contextual campaigns at scale to keep patients informed and send updates in real-time, reinforcing the value of your services.

6. Follow-up feedback

Post-consultation feedback is crucial in the healthcare industry as it provides invaluable insights into a patient’s experience with service, process, and medical support. By collecting feedback about ease of use, appointment processes, or waiting time via SMS, email, or push notifications, healthcare providers can identify gaps and address patient concerns.

To make your post-appointment surveys personalized, quick, and efficient, automate the journeys and collect feedback. This will foster quality improvement and increase patient loyalty.

7. Patient segmentation for Targeted Communication

In the healthcare industry, digital transformation is driven by personalized or specific use cases, and a one-size-fits-all approach is not suitable.

With segmentation and features like cohorts, you can divide your audience into small batches to enrich your personalized messages. These are backed by custom events and personalized user recommendations across channels, including email, WhatsApp, Push notifications, and more.

For example, DentalKart made data-led decisions and increased unique conversions for subscriptions by 20% through in-app campaigns. The brand used ML and behavioral analysis to optimize inventory management and make data-driven decisions.

Pro tip: Use features like predictive segments to aid the journey. For example, after viewing the report on the app, you can create segments of users who are most likely, moderately likely, and least likely to book a consultation. Furthermore, this can be clubbed with contextualized messages.

8. Educational material

So you’re struggling to drive engagement – what’s your option? All leading healthcare brands are driving solid conversations with their customers on social media, apps, and websites via educational and explanation material.

Be it YouTube video links set up on the app through a personalized homepage or downloadable PDFs shared on WhatsApp after consultation – by leveraging technology, healthcare providers can deliver personalized experiences, be proactive, and offer efficient care to patients. Empower your patients to make informed decisions by providing automated links or attachments of educational content.

These resources will help patients better understand their diagnostic reports, enabling them to take charge of their health with confidence.

Conclusion

As consumers embrace digital channels, brands must adapt to evolving engagement management technologies. Is your mar-tech equipped to meet diverse customer demands in today’s ever-evolving landscape?

At WebEngage, we’re dedicated to crafting scalable, user-friendly marketing automation solutions. With over 12 years of experience, we’ve assisted 800+ brands in driving high conversions.

Powered by our state-of-the-art CDP and marketing automation tools, healthcare brands can deliver highly personalized messages tailored to patient needs, fostering stronger patient-provider relationships.

Looks like something your healthcare brand can use? Book a free demo now.