One of the sectors that have been impacted the most throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has been, believe it or not, the healthcare sector. With people either too scared to go to their family doctors and/or clinics for fear of contracting the virus, or just not sure whether their doctor’s office is even open for business, this has resulted in a lot of uncommonly empty waiting rooms.
However, we know that people are still getting sick and require much needed prescriptions, medication, and medical advice, so how can clinics and medical offices ensure that their patients know that they are open, as well as able to provide alternative methods of care such as telemedicine?
By communicating with them of course!
Contacting each and every patient individually sounds like a massive pain, you say? You would certainly be correct. But, luckily with an automated communications platform, you can easily send messages to many contacts at once!
Key word = automation
Automation provides so many benefits in every industry, from providing the ability to reach many people at once to being able to set up messages ahead of time and schedule them to be sent whenever is appropriate.
When it comes to medical offices and clinics, these benefits definitely come in handy. Automation is a great time saver, allowing greater focus to be spent performing other important tasks, such as booking appointments and seeing patients.
With the help of an automation platform, medical clinics are able to set up elaborate awareness campaigns to be sent to patients containing multiple touches. Or, alternatively they decide only a simple one or two touch campaign is required. Depending on the overall purpose for communicating with patients, whether it is letting them know the new opening hours for a clinic or for re-booking patients’ canceled appointments, there is a lot that automation can provide to help facilitate these communications.
Setting up an automated awareness campaign
For example, say you wanted to create a telephone communication campaign for your medical office to make sure that your patients are aware that they are still able to be seen by a doctor in person, or that there is a telemedicine alternative available for those who may still be wary about waiting rooms.
In the automation platform, you would set up this campaign so that you are sending a telephone call with a pre-configured message to a list of your contacts on a scheduled date, letting them know that the you are still open and are able to see patients who may have medical needs that are unrelated to COVID-19.
Following the send of this phone call message to your list of patients, you can put the patients into a delay element for a defined length of time (e.g. a few days) and then once the time has passed, you can have the system automatically send a follow-up phone with details about any telemedicine options you may have available. You can keep adding to this campaign however you like depending on the number of phone calls you wish to send to you patients. For example, maybe you would like to send an additional phone call to reassure your patients of the precautionary measures you have put in place in your waiting rooms.
As well, in the event your medical office receives any new patients after the campaign has already been initiated, you can include them in the campaign by adding a form element to the beginning that will trigger any new patients once they sign up.
The telephone campaign mentioned above could potentially look like this:
Not just for telephone calls
Not all patients like to receive automated phone calls though. So how can medical clinics and offices cater to patients who may want to receive an email or a text message instead?
Believe it or not, the same automation platform can help!
Multi-channel communication allows your medical clinic to ensure patients receive messages when you need them to. The sooner they are notified that the clinic is open and doctors are available to treat non-COVID-related medical issues, the sooner doctors can schedule appointments and provide much needed medical care and advice, whether face to face or via telemedicine depending on the patients’ preferences.
By asking your patients how they would like to be contacted, this allows you to be sure they will receive your messages in a timely manner.
Creating a multi-channel awareness campaign like the one mentioned above for the phone-specific campaign is very similar except of course for the addition of the extra communication channels (i.e. emails and text messages). Also, you will need to add a mechanism to tell the system which channel to use when sending to a specific patient – this can be achieved through the use of a decision filter. This filter will cause the system to look at the patient’s contact profile, identify what their preferred contact method is, and send them down the branch of the campaign for that specific channel.
Here is what a multi-channel awareness campaign could look like:
Looking for more?
Is your medical office or clinic struggling to get the word out to patients that you are open and ready to provide care either in person or virtually?
Are you looking for a way to fill up your empty waiting rooms?
Well, look no further!
With SimplyCast’s all-in-one automation communication and engagement platform, you are able to set up simple and sophisticated campaigns to get the word out to your patients in whatever manner they choose.
Click the button below to request a free demo of the platform so you can learn more about how you can leverage this comprehensive solution in the way that works best for you!
