Healthcare is a complex business industry with loads of moving parts. And at numerous occasions, these systems are critical to the lives of patients, so you need to ensure that they’re up and functioning well all the time.
And given the tremendous pressure on healthcare businesses, it’s important to iron out any hiccups in these operations to ensure you can deliver your services with the greatest efficiency possible.
So how do you improve your healthcare business’s operational efficiency and give it the jump it needs to deliver your patients’ needs effectively?
Let’s find out.
7 Ways to Boost Your Operational Efficiency
Here are the tactics that you can employ to improve your healthcare business’s operational efficiency.
1. Integrate AI Into Your Workflow
Let’s face it—administrative tasks can take up a lot of your time. And that’s why it’s critical to streamline them by leveraging the right tech stack to automate things, and AI can help your cause.
There are numerous administrative tasks that AI can help you automate, including accounting. For instance, a bookkeeping assistant can give your team a detailed look into your accounts. It can also give better transparency to patients.
With the advent of generative AI, loads of other processes like creating SOPs for marketing tasks can be put into the fast lane.
Want to create ads?
AI’s got you covered.
Email campaigns?
Check.
And this is just the beginning. You can incorporate AI into processes like customer service, healthcare record management, etc.
That said, it’s important to ensure that you secure your patient data well as you need to comply with HIPAA.
2. Scale Your Marketing
Patient acquisition is a challenge that any healthcare business has to face. And this marketing can consume a lot of time and resources. So the key to improving your operational efficiency in this segment is to identify the current trends and increase your discoverability.
Some of the tactics that you can employ to boost your visibility are:
- Target new audience and partners: Expanding business is good practice. LinkedIn is a great platform where you can find relevant people and companies. You prepare quality data list and scale them using a right LinkedIn profile scraping API. Start approaching them to increase your network.
- Create an optimized website: An optimized website is a necessity at the present time. You can use an AI website builder tool to create search engines and user-friendly websites and boost your online presence.
- Scale your blog: You might have already developed a blog that talks about health and illnesses. But scaling it up is the real deal to drive more traffic to your website. You can use a combination of your team and generative AI to push more content out and drive greater traffic.
- Make videos: To further increase your reach, you can create brand videos that elaborate on your healthcare facilities, services, and specialists. It can set your brand apart from the rest and give you an edge. There are several AI tools like VEED and Lumen that can help you create videos with ease. You could also use a platform like Canva.
- Showcase patient testimonials: Social proof can work wonders for your healthcare business. So, you can leverage patient testimonials to win over your target audience.
- Leverage social media: Social media is yet another place where you can improve your discoverability. While Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are the standard platforms, don’t miss to experiment with Threads.
3. Incorporate Real-time Communications
One of the main goals of a marketing team is to simplify your communications with patients. External communications can be time-consuming, and it also play a critical role in patient acquisition and experience. That’s why it’s crucial to open up real-time communications with them to improve your operational efficiency.
You should consider live streaming to connect with them regularly. Using live streaming platforms, you can connect with your patients in real time and build an audience. You could:
- Invite doctors to AMA
- Discuss various medical conditions
- Show what goes on behind the scenes in the healthcare facility
- Invite other guests to attend your live sessions
This can play a major role in positioning your healthcare specialists as experts and could pave the path to drive patients to you.
4. Don’t Ignore Traditional Media
Ever since digital marketing has taken the world by storm, traditional marketing methods may not pop into your head. But with digital signage software and tools, here’s the thing—there’s still a massive audience that you can reach by leveraging methods like local TV ads, billboards, radio, and newspaper ads.
These methods can help you reach your local audience. Additionally, it could help you reach an audience that you might have totally forgotten about when targeting your digital campaigns.
Finally, these modes let you get creative with your campaigns in a different way. Look at this billboard from JFK Medical Center.
Image via Pinterest
5. Mix Healthcare Marketing with Physician Referrals
As a marketing team for a large healthcare brand, it’s important to reach out to physicians who can promote your business and bring in more patients. You can think of physicians as micro-influencers who can help promote your brand among their patient circles.
To ensure you get a maximum number of physician referrals, it’s important to connect with them well. Here are a few strategies you can employ:
- Connect with the physicians regularly
- Manage your physician relationships well
- Incentivize the physicians by thanking them
- Reach out to more physicians
- Understand their problems and help them
6. Adopt Emergency Notification Systems
Emergency situations can crop up at any time in a healthcare business. That necessitates the need for an emergency notification plan that can help you communicate critical information quickly.
Sending out emergency notifications using an emergency notification platform is a great idea in this case. You can send alerts to all your concerned employees with the click of a button.
You must have a system in place for non-emergencies too, especially if you’ve got off-site teams. A team collaboration platform can work well here. For instance, you can see this list of Slack alternatives by Attrock to find tools that your team can use to simplify communication.
Your communication plan must also detail how you’ll go about internal communications during emergency situations.
7. Create a Patient Portal
While digitizing and storing your patient records in a healthcare CRM can simplify things for your organization, you can take it a step further by creating a patient portal.
Through such a portal, you can give your patients unique login credentials through which they can access their medical records. Not only does it improve your transparency and customer experience, but also improves your operational efficiency. That’s because patients can see their records without having to reach out to any member of your team, saving them time.
And the best part?
This portal can be your very own spot to market your healthcare business to get repeat patients. You can release the latest updates, share success stories, and awareness-related content with your patients on this portal to drive them again to your business.
Final Thoughts
Eliminating any inefficiencies from the operational processes of healthcare organizations can play a major role in boosting patient satisfaction, medical care, and even profits. By leveraging the right tech stack, you can securely store patient records and market your healthcare business to a large audience.
From live streaming to building strong physician networks and leveraging traditional marketing methods, there’s a lot that can be done to put your healthcare business out there and gain more patients.
