The Executive Suite: 3 Patient engagement trends to watch in 2024

With 2024 on the horizon, patient engagement remains a top priority for physician practices. It’s no secret that a more engaged patient population is critical to ensure continuous growth amid increasing healthcare costs, staffing shortages, and an evolving regulatory landscape. As we prepare to turn the page on 2023, here are a few trends we can expect to see in the patient engagement space in 2024.

Custom content reigns supreme

Physician practices understand and appreciate the value of in-office point-of-care education and technology to engage the right patient with the right content right before they see their physician. Not to mention, patients are craving educational content during their visits.

Moving into 2024, practices will increasingly look to point-of-care education and engagement tools to feature content tailored to their specific goals and patient populations to drive a more personalized experience. For example, practices can deliver education focused on the benefits of regular cancer screenings to drive volume and, ultimately, outcomes.

Next year we’ll see that increased emphasis on customizing content to serve a specific practice’s needs and objectives—such as improving one or more quality metrics or addressing challenges faced by certain patient populations.

High-tech, high-touch engagement

While technology continues to extend patient care and patient engagement beyond the physical doctor’s office, technology can never replace the human element of medicine. No matter the setting, clinical staff should always play a starring role in any patient engagement technology to ensure patients feel appreciated and cared for.

Let’s take, for example, a patient whose blood pressure is being monitored remotely and has spiked for a few days in a row. While there is a chance that the patient will recognize the negative trend and make proactive lifestyle changes, there’s a real possibility they won’t take action. That’s where the right remote patient monitoring, paired with weekly nurse check-ins can make a difference. If we solely relied on technology in this example, we could see delayed care interventions and a potential negative downstream impact on patient empowerment and satisfaction. Leveraging patient engagement technology and the right level of personalized care can help staff triage patients appropriately and optimize each patient experience.

The continued quest for a seamless patient experience

The age-old problem of creating a seamless patient experience continues in 2024 as provider-patient communication spans multiple, disparate systems throughout the patient journey. How is a practice communicating with a patient before coming into the office? After the visit, what test results or follow-up care instructions are shared via a patient portal?

While it’s exciting to see how far technology has come and the countless point solutions available to today’s practice, these systems are seldom integrated and ultimately place more burden on the patient. What’s more, attempting to aggregate these disparate systems requires time and resources from an already overburdened practice staff.

As a digital health company, we’re continuing to unearth ways that our award-winning education and engagement solutions can help create a more seamless experience that increases patient engagement while optimizing staff time. At the heart of our endeavors is helping integrate patient engagement tools into the practice workflow, especially in the exam room.

We’re excited for a future in which our technology can be customized down to the patient and provider level, support a high-tech and high-touch experience, and reduce friction to create better awareness, better understanding, better conversations, and better health.