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Are you in search of the best patient engagement software? Discovering a digital platform that aligns with your needs can be daunting. We have taken on the challenge and researched on your behalf, so you can save time scrolling through multiple software offers. We have reviewed many comments from users of these tools in 2023 to distill their current pros and cons.
This blog post outlines the leading patient engagement solutions, showcasing their notable characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages. Later on, it also offers tips on how to pick the right patient software for your requirements.
However, before we unveil the domain champions, let us briefly discuss the concept and benefits of patient engagement.
If we look at a typical healthcare organization's performance two or three decades ago, it was primarily about financial numbers. The prevailing assumption among healthcare leaders was that other metrics like safety and quality of care would be less measurable and less critical.
We have gone a long way since then. Today's healthcare providers understand that non-financial outcomes, such as patient experience and safety, are as important as balance sheets and profits. Furthermore, the research featured in Harvard Business Review reveals that medical organizations with higher experience levels driven by engaged patients and staff are safer and more financially sound.
The central premise of patient engagement is that healthcare providers on one side and patients, their families, and carers on the other side should collaborate to improve health and well-being. Individuals empowered to make decisions and take ownership of their health journey tend to experience higher satisfaction with care delivery and better health outcomes overall. Furthermore, when hospitals engage patients in a conversation about their conditions and preferences, it may strengthen mutual understanding and accountability.
Patient engagement technology helps medical treatment providers to interact meaningfully with their patients. It comprises various digital tools, including telemedicine, messaging, personal health apps, portals, wearables, and more, that allow patients to access and monitor their health data, communicate with physicians, and receive individualized recommendations.
Patient engagement platforms have become increasingly popular due to the need for more personalized, responsive, and transparent healthcare. The technology's promise to increase patient participation in care leads to a more people-centered medical service delivery and an efficient and sustainable health system overall.
While primary care providers usually serve as the first point of contact for patients with health problems, they are not the only entities benefiting from higher patient engagement. Specialty practices like cardiology or orthopedics can see reduced employee workload from adopting patient portals. Pharma companies increase their customer centricity through seeking patient input, communicating trial outcomes, and involving patients in product creation — the critical attributes of patient engagement, according to the Boston Consulting Group.
Several research companies converge on the current global market size for patient engagement tools to approach USD 20 billion. They also expect its growth rate to be from 10% to 20% in the coming years. Regionally, North America dominates the market, with about a third of global revenue generated in the US, where most prominent patient engagement software companies operate.
We have compared multiple lists of market leaders and their solutions to bring you our curated selection of the top 12 patient engagement tools and platforms, including custom development. To identify the benefits and drawbacks of each selected product, we analyzed what patients and healthcare professionals say about their experience using it. Klas Research, Capterra, and the EMRSystems catalog are among valuable sources of user feedback on healthcare software where we reviewed the latest commentary (within the last six months).
So, here the patient engagement winners in 2023 are.
CleverDev Software is one of the top providers of custom software engineering services in healthcare, with a range of successfully delivered projects. It understands industry-specific challenges and ensures that every medical solution integrates with the ecosystem and meets security standards while complying with HIPAA and other relevant regulations.
The company develops general hospital applications, telemedicine systems, health monitoring apps, and other specialized software that have proven to generate significant value for its clients and increase patient engagement.
Investing in the custom development of medical apps for your patients gives you high control over the end product and how aligned it is with your actual needs. Unconstrained by legacy solutions, healthcare technology developers can start from scratch and analyze what your unique patients and doctors expect from a medical application to build the best health app.
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First introduced to manage phone calls, this product from athenahealth, Inc., has developed into a suite of patient communication tools, including an industry-leading patient portal, virtual care delivery (athenaTelehealth), and a mobile app (athenaPatient). You can integrate it with EHR, billing, and other systems in the athenaOne network, a cloud-based platform capturing performance data from US medical providers in near real time.
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eClinicalWorks is a significant provider of cloud-based solutions, from EHR to billing and patient engagement. Its offer includes a private grid cloud with 9 data centers across the US. The patient portal is not the only engagement tool provided — the 'healow' family of lifestyle and health apps empowers patients with insights into different areas, such as pregnancy and children's growth. Furthermore, check-in, self-scheduling, messenger, telehealth, and educational tools are available.
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Epic Systems Corporation is primarily developing interoperable EHR software and boasts of holding current electronic records of more than 305 million patients. Besides being a large US provider, it has installed extensive health record systems in the UK and across the Nordic region over the past decade, even though its costly and problem-rich implementations caused criticism. Last year, it also unveiled a CRM platform, Cheers, embedded into its software suite.
The MyChart portal allows patients to view their records, message doctors, attend e-visits, and complete surveys. It won the Best in KLAS award among patient portals in 2023.
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GetWellNetwork Inc. has included its "Get Well" mission in the company name. In 2014, they founded the O'Neil Center for Patient Engagement Research, a one-of-a-kind industry think tank where researchers study patient and family engagement and translate the science into practice. Compared to other providers, GetWellNetwork does not focus on promoting patient portals. Instead, it offers an engagement platform with a portfolio of education, communication, and entertainment tools.
Besides the GetWell Anywhere app, the company promotes its GetWell Inpatient solution, a deeply adopted interactive patient system; GetWell Rounds+, a digital rounding tool for clinicians; the patient-driven care management tool GetWell Loop; and GetWell Navigate, delivering AI-driven texting and care coordination.
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Greenway Health is a vendor of specialty-focused solutions in EHR, practice management, and billing. It emphasizes compliance with the 21st Century Cures Act and has a devoted expert-led academy providing educational resources. Within patient engagement, its integrated offer includes messaging and an online patient portal. Access to the latter is possible on any device, screen size, and browser.
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One of the largest corporations in our review, McKesson is most known for distributing pharmaceuticals: it delivers every third drug in North America. Its McKesson Medical-Surgical unit offers a range of solutions for patient engagement and communication, including VerbalCare, a mobile app linking providers to patients and guiding the latter to improve their health.
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Medical Information Technology, Inc. is a more than 50-year-old company, and it is all about EHR solutions (even its corporate website URL features "ehr" as a subdomain by default) with over 2300 institutions worldwide as its customers. It also offers patient engagement tools as part of EHR solutions - including the MHealth app and a patient portal. The latter is a comprehensive platform that gives patients access to health data, educational resources, and personalized treatment plans.
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Similarly to other companies in this review, NextGen Healthcare has developed an integrated platform to serve a variety of clinical practices. It focuses on EHR software and practice management, but there are additional engagement tools for every step of the patient journey. NextGen's capabilities in this area improved with the acquisition of Medfusion, a leading provider of patient experience platforms, in 2019. The cloud-based platform offers patients access to records, e-visits, secure messaging with providers, and payment options.
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A subsidiary of the world-leading software company Oracle Corporation since June 2022, Cerner offers patient engagement tools that comprise digital front door, digital practice, the HealtheLife patient portal, virtual health tools, and healthcare CRM. It is possible to customize these through strategic third-party arrangements.
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One of the primary ways to foster patient engagement is through better communication. SolutionReach focuses on easy and effective patient communications through personalized messaging, from online scheduling to reminder texting and education follow-ups. The company claims to have sent the first patient text message when SMS grew popular over two decades ago and reached 1 in 4 Americans through its services. Initially serving dentist practices, the provider has developed to support all healthcare verticals.
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Veradigm (Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Inc. before the company name change in January 2023) is best known for its practice management and EHR products. Yet, it also offers integrating ambulatory and acute healthcare practices with a leading flexible mobile-first engagement platform. Earlier this year, the Best in KLAS 2023 report recognized it as the most improved software product based on customer satisfaction ratings.
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Once you have researched the various patient engagement offers in the market or have considered the popular options presented in this blog post, how do you choose the right one for your needs? We recommend you take the following steps to ensure an optimal choice:
As we have seen, patient engagement platforms offer a range of features, from client portals to visit scheduling, messaging, and educational resources. The deployment of such software can lead to quantifiable improvements in various settings, such as reducing no-shows with the help of appointment reminders and increasing medication adherence rates through prescription intake and refill alerts in medication management apps.
If you are tired of outdated healthcare processes but want to avoid passing the burden of feature-crowded standard software to your patients, choose custom solutions at CleverDev Software with just the right capabilities aligned with your workflow, goals, and budget. We design and build from-scratch applications and modernize existing systems to improve their performance and interoperability, all with a strict focus on compliance and security.
In one of our top-notch projects, we have added a powerful engagement tool for collaboration between patients and professionals to a client's healthcare network. It is an integrated element of a custom Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) platform we had already created for the company. Our dedicated team of back-end and web developers and other specialists provided their expertise and skill during the six months of the project. Two years later, the client has doubled its user base and secured a 97% patient retention rate.
Whether you are a small local practice or a large multinational healthcare organization, a pharma company, or an insurer, patient engagement tools can help you stay connected with patients, enhance their experience, and provide them with the care and support they need.
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