Reward programs are prevalent across the corporate world, but they're fairly recent in the healthcare industry. As the urge to enhance patient reward grows, more facilities are considering introducing it to their facilities.
Patient reward programs incentivize patients for their existing relationship with a health institution by offering them some advantages for their loyalty.
Patient loyalty programs have such a large, beneficial influence on both increasing profitability and retaining your loyal patients in your health business. To guarantee that you're receiving the best of any patient reward program, you should implement three key principles.
- Having your reward program
- Leveraging on automated technology to run it
- Improving the patient satisfaction
Having And Managing A Reward Program for Patients
The most effective reward programs are practice-specific and self-contained. This is because manufacturer programs, also known as partner programs, may generally be employed in any business that sells the company's merchandise. As a result, if a patient leaves your clinic, they can use the incentives they earned with you at a rival's clinic. This type of reward scheme encourages people to keep utilizing the company's goods but not to keep utilizing you as the supplier. This is bad for the patient's long-term worth.
Ensure you develop a strategy of your own and that's tailored to your firm. You can use partner program incentives as a template, but ensure it's entirely distinctive to you. It ought to be personalized with your brand and is unique to your business.
Automating Your Patient Reward Program
You should also be cautious about the information you deliver to your patients. Don't undervalue the influence of your messages on your patient's satisfaction as a whole. You wouldn't want to irritate the patient by flooding them with emails on a regular schedule, even though you'd love to streamline contact with them. Instead, you want some of your interactions with the client to be fruitful. When clients hit a particular point threshold but have not visited your clinic in quite some, you should send them a smart reminder. Streamlining these messages will reduce your employee's effort and, also improve the number of clients who revisit your clinic.
Client Experience
It's crucial to know whether your rewards program affects the overall patient experience or not. Patients will learn about the rewards program through your employees, so you want to make sure they know the details. They should understand the quantitative rationale that underpins the programs' advantages and properly explain this to patients. You'll produce a far quality therapeutic experience by ensuring that your employees are well-versed in the rewards program, and this will eventually lead to a greater client lifetime value.
Deploying a Patient Reward Program
A reward program is not limited to a certain industry, the healthcare industry can also benefit from a reward system to increase their profit and encourage patients to visit not just when they get ill. Allow your patients to earn points for visits and being on time to their appointment. Rewarding good patient performance can be the key to your clinic success.
When to reward patients with points:
- When they're on time
- When they make it to the appointment
- When they refer your practice to a friend
- When they do their do diligence
- When they take a survey
- When they receive a vaccine
There many reasons to reward your patients, but what kind of rewards should they receive when they meet the required points?
- Free or discounted exams
- Money back after a visit
- A gift card
Improve Your Practice Space
It is usually often a valuable idea to redesign and/or make aesthetic enhancements to your office building (wallpaper paint, carpet, new, etc.). Your practice will typically grow 10 - 15% through increased patient referrals, and improved case acceptance of upper-level procedures, providing a great return on investment.
That means a large, attractive internally-lit sign, along with an engaging "storefront." Your visibility isn't just a matter of the signage, it's the whole presence of your office!. While you want to create a beautiful looking space, incorporate that loyalty reward program into the new interior design concept. Make sure to have smart tablets to make checking in experience easier. Besides the smart tablets, create an information corner that explains program advantages and how-tos.
A new smart space is important to maximize ROI.
The Advantages Of Having A Reward System
Patient reward programs are a fantastic way to get the most out of your patients. They're simple to set up and create little disturbance to your practice. Also, they can provide a slew of advantages for your practice, such as
- Stop price competition with your competitors
- Retain your current clients.
- Create personal connections.
- Decreases patient engagement expenses
- Better ROI
Conclusion
While loyalty programs once only seemed appropriate for grocery stores, coffee shops, hotel chains, and airlines, they're now showing up in health care (and have been for a few years). It should come as no surprise that loyalty programs can strengthen the patient-provider relationship and encourage patients to achieve their care goals. Best of all, this program can save you money as a provider, when more patients are making it to their appointments and more referrals. At AVU, we train our Healthcare Administration graduate students to think out-side the box to find solutions that can maximize profit. Getting your graduate degree in Healthcare Administration can boost your chances of creating a forward thinking environment that can help you and your team reach your highest potentials.
