Technologies can strengthen the provider-patient connection, help practices meet evolving patient demands, and even attract new patients. To meet the needs of patients across the “patient journey,” healthcare practitioners require a well-executed digital strategy that is capable of managing the complete patient-clinic relationship so that the whole patient pathway is outlined and all relevant data is recorded and tracked carefully.
Medesk is medical practice management software that makes work with patients and medical data easier for practitioners, receptionists and practice managers.
What defines the modern patient and how should healthcare practitioners adapt their approach to working with patients over the coming year?
Patients are more proactive than ever before when it comes to their well-being. They are progressively able and willing to accept technology as a toolkit with which to participate in their own healthcare. Patients want to discover new ways of leveraging digital advances to fulfill their health objectives. Using an integrated healthcare ecosystem like Medesk means that clinics are finally finding it possible to keep pace with their patients’ expectations.
It is impossible to deny that patients have gone digital and have no intention of going back. Carrying out your own research on doctors and clinics before actually attending an appointment is so hassle-free nowadays that a considerable percentage of any given clinic’s potential patient base finds itself perfectly capable of choosing the right services and, indeed, the physician for their exact needs. For example, instead of making a phone call, patients can book an appointment online in a matter of seconds, as well as keeping track of test results, treatment plans and so on. For clinics, contending with all of this let alone the other innovations that patients expect can be very challenging, to say the least.
It’s time for medical practices to go digital and, in doing so, provide patients with the maximum in terms of service, attention and convenience.
What are the obstacles that clinics can expect to face in the patient engagement solutions space and how does Medesk effectively overcome them?
The main hurdle that clinics face when trying to promote themselves to new patients is that the patient journey from the internet to the premises tends to be rather opaque. It’s often poorly understood how they found the clinic, and what specifically convinced them to book an appointment in the first place. Here’s a big problem before the patient journey has even properly started!
Amongst other things, the Medesk platform transforms all this into a series of transparent and workable steps from patient acquisition and their first visit to treatment, retention and future visits.
What are Medesk’s core values and how did the platform come into being?
Ten years before co-founding Medesk, Vladimir Kovalskiy dreamed of creating a platform that would allow doctors to provide their patients with a means of properly engaging with their own healthcare. Vladimir’s team had already begun to work on bespoke automated solutions for small clinics on a case-by-case basis when the first plans for the Medesk digital platform came to fruition.
As we gained valuable experience and feedback as a result of our localised solutions, we were sure that a properly unified digital health platform would be a success on a much wider scale. After all, healthcare providers need to be able to interact with one another without interruption if they are to meet their patients’ needs and the lack of a reliable digital means of doing so was a real problem.
In 2012, the Medesk platform was released with the intention of it being a single platform upon which clinics, labs, and insurance companies would collaborate with ease. The end goal was to help patients receive a whole new level of service quality from their healthcare providers. Today, Medesk is focused on simplifying the patient journey by rapidly collecting and processing clinical and business data, resulting in the optimisation and cost-effective management of everything from the patient acquisition channels all the way to a complete resolution of their medical and surgical issues.
How does Medesk distinguish itself when it comes to solving the digital and management challenges faced by clinics?
Medesk perceives medical practices as service providers which should offer high value to their patients. We are dedicated to making sure this happens at all levels in all healthcare organisations.
Medesk acts to manage patients’ relationships with clinics so that the whole patient pathway is outlined and all relevant data is recorded and tracked carefully. Ultimately, clinics using the Medesk platform can handle everything about a patient whether it’s appointment booking, automatic email reminders, provision of medical data upon request or just about anything else.
Our platform makes it so simple for doctors and patients to interact that their relationship becomes truly balanced one, letting patients fully engage in their own healthcare at last.
Can you cite one or two customer success stories where Medesk helped their customers address a specific concern?
We have a dedicated Customer Success department to handle every single problem that clinics might encounter. As such, we have a wide range of case studies to share on just about every topic you can think of. Throughout our collaborations with all kinds of private practices at different stages in their lifecycle, we have implemented a vast array of practice and patient relationship management tools.
One of the most common issues facing a new clinic is that they do not have a pre-existing list of patients who can be encouraged to attend. This is especially true when doctors are making the transition to private practice when they are used to serving patients in the public sector, or when they are moving from one end of the country to another.
One particular success story that springs to mind involves an occupational health practitioner who had recently returned to London after practising for several years in New York. She could hardly bring her patients in tow across the pond, so she had to start from scratch.
We provided her with some unique patient and referral booking links for specific acquisition channels to help her learn which kinds of patients were joining the clinic and how they found it in the first place. The level of data analysis and interpretation we offer means that our customers can tweak their advertising campaigns and the messages therein to perfection, thus bringing in a reliable quantity of patients no matter what the situation.
Due to all the support from Medesk, our occupational therapist was able to identify a number of companies who were referring their employees in her direction and footing the bill. She is now working on a partnership that should encourage these employees to visit in their own right, thus developing the beginnings of a standalone patient list.
What does the future roadmap look like for Medesk?
Our goal is to realize our new concept of Medesk 24. Right now, the Medesk platform unites all the tools essential to clinics. In the future, we will extend this to include all the services that help patients to manage their own health in real-time. This will allow people to focus on prophylactic lifestyle changes, preventative diagnostics, risk factor management and so much more.
If you had to describe Medesk in one phrase, what would it be?
Medesk is all about flexibility and customization. Even if we come across a totally new problem, our growing wealth of experience combined with our unique insights and smart digital tools means that we are now better placed than ever before to help clinics engage their patients like never before.