Sneak Peek at 2021 Consumer Trends in Patient Engagement Survey Results

At the upcoming Stericycle Communication Solutions webinar on November 16 at 2 PM ET (11 AM PT), they’ll be sharing their 2021 US Consumer Trends in Patient Engagement Survey Results.  I’m lucky enough to have been invited to join Matt Dickson, Senior VP, and Sarah Bennight, Director of Marketing at Stericycle to take part in the discussion of the results.  Needless to say, the survey is chock full of interesting insights into patients’ expectations as we provide patient care amidst COVID.

While you’ll have to sign up for the webinar to hear all the results, I’ve been given permission to give you a sneak peek at just one of the many patient insights.  In this case, they asked patients about their scheduling experience.  No doubt the scheduling experience has changed dramatically over the last couple years, and so I was interested to see what patients thought of their scheduling experience.  Here’s their overall feeling about appointment scheduling:

What was shocking to me about this result was how few people weren’t satisfied at all with their scheduling experience.  I thought a lot more people would be really dissatisfied with scheduling in healthcare.  Instead, almost everyone is at least somewhat satisfied with scheduling and many are very satisfied.  Maybe it’s too simplistic of a view, but I guess if the patients got an appointment, then it’s hard for them to say they weren’t satisfied at all.  And I’d guess that most got an appointment.

Setting aside the fact that most had some level of satisfaction with their appointment scheduling, it’s still worth noting that 37% of patients felt like something was lacking from their appointment scheduling experience.  This illustrates that we still have plenty of room for improvement when it comes to scheduling patient appointments.

Why aren’t patients satisfied?  The next survey result answers that very question below:

While most of us probably could have guessed that the time it took to book an appointment would be a problem, this makes it clear that making it easy and efficient for patients to book their appointments should be problem number 1 to fix in your organization.  No doubt most of us are now used to booking every other appointment in our life quickly online.  Patients clearly want that same convenient and efficient option from their healthcare provider also.

What was more surprising to me was how many people were not satisfied with their appointment scheduling process because there weren’t appointments available soon enough.  In fact, if you join the webinar and receive the full survey results, the results identify how long a patient feels is reasonable to wait for an appointment.  It was shorter than I would have thought.  What does this mean for your organization?  If you’re scheduled too far out, patients are likely to go somewhere else.

One that I hadn’t considered, but probably should have realized was the issue of language barrier.  As someone who’s lived in another country, I know how hard a 2nd language can be on the phone.  It’s scary and frustrating.  Online is better, but many website scheduling software don’t support multiple languages.  That’s a problem for many people and a fixable frustration.

Of course, this is just one small element that we’ll be covering in the upcoming 2021 US Consumer Trends in Patient Engagement Survey Results webinar.  It’s free to sign up and attend and everyone that signs up for the event will get the full report.  Come and join us as we discuss the survey results for things like: patient trust, telehealth, patient reminders, preferred communication channels, and patient scheduling to name a few.