The Impact Of Covid-19 On Patient Retention In 2022

As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic has played a significant role in everyone’s life. It showed how weak and strong the human race can be at the same time. For the past couple of years, the world has been facing so many challenges due to the pandemic.

And according to some studies, new variants are yet to come along with the Omicron variant (not officially confirmed). After all the things people faced, they didn’t forget to get up and pat themselves for the efforts they took to overcome the situation.

Technology played an important role in helping the healthcare industry to survive and shine through these uncertain emergencies. Many healthcare platforms found new ways to deliver service using technologies.

In healthcare, patient retention became a major discussion during the pandemic. Retention of patients became difficult to some extent, due to the changing situations, rules, and regulations in the pandemic stricken world.

As we move onto 2022, many factors will help the retention of patients from getting affected by the pandemic.

Procedures Which Were Canceled

Around the country, almost 35% of procedures and tests were canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There were changes in the rules and regulations in healthcare. People with chronic diseases suffered the most during this period.

Due to the fear and restrictions from getting out of houses, they avoided treatments. This increased depression, anxiety, stress, fatigue, and isolation.

The new regulations and restrictions on the medical field resulted in a shortage of medical staff. This in turn impacted the care delivery to patients.

As we stepped into 2022, these regulations and strictness have been relaxed and people have started living along with the situation. More staff, practitioners, and nurses are being posted to attend to more patients.

This rushing may create improper medical credentialing, which can impact a healthcare organization negatively. People are now less frightened and are coming forward to take treatments and tests.

The healthcare organizations are also following adequate safety measures as standardized by the government, which confirms more safety and security to the patients. This will help increase patient retention.

RELATED: Digital Patient Engagement Tools: Why You Need It In 2022?

Patient Portal – Connecting Virtually

Virtual healthcare was already a used term even before the pandemic. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people are for the past two years been compelled to live in a situation, where they should, to some extent, rely upon online services be it for anything.

During the lockdowns, people were not able to reach healthcare services due to many restrictions. Virtual healthcare came to their rescue.

Particularly the patient portals bridged the gaps between patients and their healthcare. It created a connection between people and made communication easy. Patient portals are accessible 24/7 like emergency rooms.

Patients can experience easy and stressless access to the services availed by their physicians. Due to the no need for transporting, to a specific hospital/provider, they can save their precious money, time, and effort. 

This gives them more positiveness and results in good patient/user satisfaction.

The portals also provide coverage-related information, manage the patient’s insurance, and do medical billing.

Digital access has also helped professionals in delivering care to patients. For example, telemedicine created paths for more virtual interactions between doctors and patients.

An increase in remote care has been achieved with the help of remote patient monitoring  (RPM). RPM helps physicians to reach people in more remote areas. This removes geographical obstacles.

RPM readings also help in creating other revenue streams for providers.

Evolution Of Technology

Technological can not only impact patient care delivery, but it can impact medical billing too, in a positive way. Through healthcare Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) companies and in-house systems, benefits like out-of-network alerts, pre-insurance verifications, and access to patient responsibility estimator are gained by medical systems.

It paved way for more transparency between patients and their practitioners. This in turn created the trust and improved the relationship between them. 

In addition, the No Surprises Act, which took effect in January 2022, protects people covered under group and individual health plans from receiving surprise medical bills when they receive most emergency services, non-emergency services from out-of-network providers at in-network facilities, and services from out-of-network air ambulance service providers.

Financial Engagement Of Patients

All these changes and advancements happened in the healthcare industry have increased patient engagement. This increase in patient engagement, in turn, helped to increase the revenue of the organizations.

As we said earlier, with the eradication of unexpected medical bills, patients will gain trust over the particular institution, from which they have a good payment experience.

And with the advancements in technology, there will be lesser medical billing errors that will result in lesser claim denials.

Conclusion

As it seems, that covid may continue to exist for some more years. People have started to live along with the pandemic and overcome the fear of the virus. This in no way is a full stop for living our life. Everyone can still enjoy a better, advanced, and full-fledged experience.

At Vozo, we provide a sophisticated patient portal, telemedicine, medical billing, and other software to make your practice process simple, easy, and advanced at the same time. Schedule a demo today. 

“Let’s make your patient retention, an easy job”