5 Key Components of Effective Patient Engagement Strategies
-
The Most Effective Patient Engagement Strategies in Healthcare
Leverage Technology Thoughtfully
Clarify Patient Interactions & Lead With Empathy
Implement Shared Decision-Making
Create an Aligned Team
Focus on Continuous Engagement & Feedback
-
At EnticEdge, we are healthcare and wellness business consultants dedicated to helping companies clarify and align around their competitive advantage, which we call your authentic edge. Our team brings 30+ years of healthcare expertise in strategic advising, value mapping, business consulting, client experience, team and cross-departmental alignment, and more, all tailored to helping teams achieve mission-driven growth. Meet with a strategist to learn more!
Imagine two patients. Both are seeking behavioral health treatment for the same condition. Each of them ends up with vastly different experiences with providers (and vastly different health outcomes!).
“Patient S” enters a facility where engagement is easy. She’s met with easy-to-use mobile apps, flexible scheduling, and proactive outreach from her care team. Plus, readily offered transportation assistance and evening hours help make sure she can fit treatment into her busy life. The result? She’s a model engaged patient, and her mental health is improving rapidly.
Contrast this with “Patient M's” experience. He’s handed a paper packet without much personalized guidance, and throughout his care he deals with unreachable tech support, inflexible scheduling, and confusing automated reminders that actually make his anxiety worse. Despite wanting help, system barriers make staying engaged nearly impossible for him.
These two scenarios illustrate how healthcare patient engagement has far less to do with patient motivation than it does with how healthcare systems either support or block participation.
If you’re thinking about how to engage patients in their care more, this is good news for healthcare organizations. It means you have the power to transform patient experiences and outcomes, no matter how strong their personal motivation to engage with their care is.
You just need to have the right patient engagement strategies. Keep reading for how to increase patient engagement in 2025!
Importance of Patient Engagement in Healthcare
Increasing patient engagement is critical for everything — from improved health outcomes to overcoming barriers to health. In fact, healthcare engagement is one of the most important tools available to help you achieve your organizational goals and improve patient health.
Recently, we wrote a deep dive into the power of improving patient engagement, including patient engagement examples and the researched-backed patient engagement benefits. While we encourage you to read the whole article, here are the highlights:
Studies have found that patient engagement results in decreased hospitalizations, reduced depression and anxiety, and an overall better quality of life for patients.
Beyond clinical benefits, healthcare organizations that prioritize patient engagement tend to see improved operational efficiency, better financial outcomes, and higher patient retention rates.
Patient engagement is truly a win-win for your bottom line and your patients.
What Is a Patient Engagement Strategy?
A patient engagement strategy is a plan for how your healthcare organization will improve patient engagement over a set period of time (such as a year or quarter).
You need a strategy because when you’re managing a larger organization (which may consist of multiple facilities and decision-makers), it’s impossible to keep everyone working toward the same goals unless you have a clear roadmap. In other words: better patient engagement won’t “accidentally” happen unless you intentionally plan for it.
We recommend our clients create a strategy for patient engagement that covers the full breadth of the patient experience, from interactions with technology, to conversations with providers, to post-care follow-ups. Keep reading for specifics on patient engagement best practices.
The Most Effective Patient Engagement Strategies in Healthcare
1. Leverage Technology Thoughtfully
Research shows that only 15-30% of patients use available digital patient engagement tools in healthcare like patient portals, despite about 90% of organizations offering them. Largely, this gap is attributed to:
Limited health literacy (patients who struggle to understand healthcare terminology)
Low digital skills (patients who don’t understand how to use the platforms)
Lack of access to computers (patients who may not have a computer at home)
Security and privacy concerns (patients who fear their inputs will be leaked)
So, “leveraging technology” has to be thoughtful and go beyond just launching a patient portal, mobile app, or interactive website. Any tech you adopt must be rolled out so that patients will actually use it. Strategies will vary, but here are some ideas for tackling common barriers to technology use:
Use plain language in digital communications (avoid any “provider jargon”)
Invest in excellent user experience (UX) design across platforms and portals
Minimize barriers to using your portals (e.g. make them accessible through a mobile device)
Educate patients on how you keep their data secure and private
So many healthcare organizations fall into the trap of adopting complex digital platforms only to find they actually discourage patient interaction — don’t let yours be one of them!
2. Clarify Patient Interactions & Lead With Empathy
Every patient comes with a unique background, set of experiences, and personal health challenges. Truly effective strategies for patient engagement validates these experiences through clear and empathetic communication at every touchpoint.
Empathy may be the key for better patient interactions (see the study here!): when practitioners “express empathy” to patients, the “effects appear to be similar to those of many common pharmacological treatments for the conditions treated.” In other words, empathy-led communication alone produces small but significant effects in patient outcomes.
Similarly, another study concluded that patients kept more appointments if they perceived their providers as listening to them, respecting them, and understanding them.
To make sure patients can benefit from your communication efforts, your communication must also be clear and easy to understand. Any and all communication with patients should be at their level — not yours. Our advice is to write and share communications (everything from educational materials to conversations with patients) at a 6th-grade level or below.
3. Implement Shared Decision-Making
As you’re likely aware, shared decision-making (sometimes abbreviated as SDM) means intentionally involving patients in their healthcare decisions.
The “old way” saw providers giving mandates to patients about what they should do (e.g. take this medication, get this surgery, see this specialist), with expectations that a patient should comply and not ask questions. By contrast, the increasingly popular philosophy of shared decision-making involves educating patients about their options and inviting them to make the ultimate decision.
Proponents of shared decision-making have found that when patients feel more agency and ownership over what happens to them in medical settings, they follow through with more commitment. In other words, patient engagement increases.
4. Create an Aligned Team
We’ve seen it time and again with our clients: when clinical and business teams operate with different priorities or understanding of patient engagement goals, your patients feel the disconnect.
For example, let’s say your clinical team is focusing on improving health literacy through educational materials and shared decision-making, but your business team is pushing for efficiency above all, which means shorter interactions with each patient. Providers are confused, unsure how to prioritize both goals, and this uncertainty shows up in patient interactions and diminishes trust.
In the end, a misaligned team will undermine even the best patient engagement initiatives.
That’s why there needs to be a focus on building bridges between clinical and business teams. When clinicians understand how engagement impacts operational efficiency and, vice versa, business teams grasp their role in clinical outcomes, they work together more effectively. And patient engagement and outcomes improve. To start creating a more aligned team, you might consider:
Regular cross-functional meetings
Sharing metrics
Collaborative project teams
But if your efforts aren’t working to break down siloes between departments, it might be time to bring in a third-party expert on team alignment, like EnticEdge.
5. Focus on Continuous Engagement & Feedback
Dynamic feedback loops are crucial for understanding how to improve patient engagement. They reveal what's working for patient engagement … and what isn't. This means regularly collecting and analyzing patient feedback through multiple channels (e.g. surveys, focus groups, or one-on-one interviews).
While typical patient satisfaction scores can be a starting place, we recommend digging deeper for qualitative insights you can more readily use to improve your engagement strategies. Make sure your tools understand the patient journey from multiple angles:
How do patients interact with your digital tools?
Where do they struggle with health information?
What barriers prevent them from following through on care plans?
This deep understanding allows you to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement before they become major issues.
Ultimately, Make Engagement Effortless for Patients
Ask yourself: "Are we making it easy for patients to be engaged? Or are we asking patients to overcome a whole lot to stay engaged?”
The answer to this question could be the difference between your organization (and your patients!) thriving and struggling. Because ultimately, successful patient engagement solutions require creating systems that make it easier for patients to participate in their care than to disengage from it.
Choose one of the strategies or patient engagement tools we outlined here and start small. Every improvement moves you closer to becoming the kind of healthcare organization that naturally creates more success stories.
The future of healthcare belongs to organizations that make engagement effortless for their patients. If you’re far behind (team misalignment, lagging systems, or confusing patient communication), it’s worthwhile to bring in an expert to diagnose the critical issues and plan a path forward. Start with a free consultation with EnticEdge today.
More articles & guides from EnticEdge
