Top communication channels for patient retention in 2024

Foreword

Are you providing the communications experience that will keep patients happy?

If not, they won’t hesitate to switch providers.

The entire healthcare industry entered crisis mode in 2020 and struggled for years to handle the workload, labor shortages, and costs brought on by the pandemic.

This report focuses on the lifeblood of the tech-enabled health continuum: communication. Communication is crucial to building trust between patient and clinician, patient and payer, and payer and clinician. But most of all, it builds trust between human and human.

Now, we’re seeing some of those burdens easing up, but many regions are still seeing challenges with labor availability and increased costs due to inflation. This means that many systems, from small local providers, to multi-state hospital systems, are underperforming financially.

It’s in this situation that we see the potential for digital communication to help players catch up financially, while also serving patients who see themselves as consumers shopping for a healthcare experience that fits their schedule and needs.

The new digital landscape in healthcare

For many years, healthcare lagged behind other industries in digital adoption. But COVID-19 was a forcing function for many providers, forcing them to find new, more efficient ways to communicate with patients.

There is still room for healthcare to catch up, but we’re seeing executives prioritizing digital and AI testing and implementation now more than ever. And we’re seeing providers use more digital tools to enable care across use cases–scheduling, appointment reminders, intake forms, health records, prescription fills, patient monitoring, chronic care, and more.

In a context as sensitive as healthcare, we can’t risk getting communication wrong. But how to get it right in an ever-evolving environment and while dealing with patient populations of all kinds?

At Bandwidth, we’re deeply committed to creating exceptional experiences via digital communications across industries. And we did some fresh research to understand what sort of communication experiences patients want in 2024.

Answers lie within

Here’s what this report is not:

• A play-by-play on how to engage a specific type of patient
• A prediction of the next macro-trend like 2020 that re-writes the normal
• A push toward another tricky piece of tech that can cause headaches for clinicians, patients, payers, or other healthcare stakeholders

Instead, this report aims to show you what patients expect from their healthcare providers in 2024, so you can build a strategy to set patients, clinicians and practice up for success, and ultimately, improve health outcomes and patient retention.

Channel optionality is not optional

The results tell a story of rising expectations, emerging communication channels, and one huge opportunity to transform healthcare in a way that technology and care blend harmoniously to address health outcomes and improve lives.

Caitlin Long
Director, Product Management at Bandwidth

Terminology

BAA: A Business Associate Agreement (BAA) is an agreement between a covered entity under HIPAA and a business associate to ensure that the business associate appropriately safeguards PHI. Bandwidth’s BAA covers our messaging API and programmable voice API.

Channel Options: Patient’s discretion to choose from multiple communication channels (SMS, voice, email, in-app, messaging platforms), so digital health platforms can help tailor their healthcare interactions.

HIPAA: The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a federal law designed to prevent the disclosure of PHI. HIPAA protects the patient by requiring entities to take reasonable measures to protect PHI.

PHI: PHI or Protected Health Information includes any health information that can be tied to or identifies an individual. PHI is legally defined by U.S. law and protected by HIPAA.

Telecomplexity: The barrier to communications innovation; the state of total befuddlement after trying to navigate the complex ecosystem of telecommunications and messaging. Ok, maybe that doesn’t sound like a real word…but it describes a real problem.

The 2024 patient-consumer communication landscape

In 2024, the patient has accepted the digital front-door options to access their healthcare provider. Next step? Making it convenient. The patients-turned-healthcare consumers are expecting their digital healthcare experience to mirror their digital retail experiences. 

But there are so many communication options. How do you decide which ones to prioritize or whether you should even offer that many? 

Patients have spoken.  

Survey

Methodology and demographics

With this report, we set out to better understand the expectations and preferences patients have when communicating with and receiving updates from their healthcare providers. We surveyed people that had visited their healthcare provider within the last year.

1500

individuals surveyed

18 Years

or above in age

United States

residents

July 2024

Survey run timeframe

We asked respondents to rate their preferences for communication across channels with 1 being most preferred and 5 being least preferred. Here are the results:

The overwhelming response? Patients prefer texting for most routine communications. But there is still a preference for live phone calls for some interactions, and email is also a preferred channel.

(On the other hand, we can see that third party messenger apps have not yet caught on with US patients.)

So the trick is to create a multi-channel strategy that enables patients to choose their preferred communication option(s), based on the present and potential future use cases. Start with the one channel that’s a shoo-in for the mix.

Texting tops the charts

Text like patient
retention depends on it

When asked about specific communication use cases, text messaging emerged as the mean most preferred channels for most use cases like:

• Preventative care reminders
• Appointment reminders
• Appointment confirmation
• Requesting prescription refills
• Receiving prescription updates

The criticality is driven home with:
28% of respondents saying they are likely to switch providers if their current provider doesn’t offer text messaging as a communication channel.

• ~85% of the above were actively engaged with their healthcare provider in the last 1-6 months, so their churn would have a noticeable impact.
• ~73% of them also report that COVID-19 changed their communication expectations.

Text has patients’ trust

Myth: Text message deliverability is complex

57% of respondents reported being comfortable with sharing their Protected Health Information (PHI) over text/SMS (up from 56% in 2023).

Patients value ease and accessibility of healthcare and don’t mind sharing secure information over an SMS.

As a healthcare provider, you can responsibly utilize this opportunity by:

• Giving your patient opt-in options throughout their journey (eg: when they make an appointment, when they fill out intake forms, etc.) to take advantage of other channels like SMS and email.
• Having compliant channels, if you’re subject to HIPAA. Ensure that your communications partner can sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) and provide a HIPAA-compliant path for communication, if required.

Do you feel comfortable with your protected health information traveling over the channels below?

Picking up the phone still matters

Doctor’s calling: Phone lives on

Myth: Automating phone-ins is complex

Phone calls are tried and tested in healthcare interactions.

For nuanced interactions like changing appointments and receiving important test results, phone calls remain a strongly preferred mode of communication to and fro.

Preferred mode to contact the healthcare provider
#1 Phone call	🧑‍💼🧑‍💼🧑‍💼🧑‍💼🧑‍💼
#2 Text	🧑‍💼🧑‍💼🧑‍💼🧑‍💼
#3 Online or via app	🧑‍💼🧑‍💼🧑‍💼
#4 Email	🧑‍💼🧑‍💼
#5 Messenger app	🧑‍💼

Preferred mode to be contacted by the healthcare provider
#1 Phone call	🧑‍💼🧑‍💼🧑‍💼🧑‍💼🧑‍💼
#2 Text	🧑‍💼🧑‍💼🧑‍💼🧑‍💼
#3 Email	🧑‍💼🧑‍💼🧑‍💼
#4 Online or via app	🧑‍💼🧑‍💼
#5 Messenger app	🧑‍💼

But, wait, didn’t we just say that SMS messaging was the preferred communication method in most scenarios? We sure did–emphasis on most.

Phone calls emerged as the channel of choice for people preferring their patient communications to be personalized or highly personalized. Why? There are channel preferences for specific points and reasons in the care process. When the conversation is critical, picking up the phone can often be the fastest way to get heard.

Channel preference by use case

You see the importance and variance of channel preferences. Let’s dig deeper into preferred communication channels by use case.

Preventive care reminders	Appointment reminders/ notifications	Appointment confirmation by patient	Appointment changes by patient
🏆 Text/SMS 🥈 Phone call	🏆 Text/SMS 🥈 Phone call	🏆 Text/SMS 🥈 Phone call	🏆 Phone call 🥈 Text/SMS

Test result notification	Requesting prescription refills	Receiving prescription updates	Receiving pre-appointment intake forms
🏆 Phone call 🥈 Text/SMS	🏆 Text/SMS 🥈 Phone call	🏆 Text/SMS 🥈 Phone call	🏆 Email 🥈 Text/SMS

Email is a close third in the mean most preferred channels for notification use cases. The adoption of online channels/apps (like MyChart or other EHR/EMR) and over-the-top messaging platforms (like Whatsapp) still lags overall. But this isn’t the case for all income groups. More on that later.

Why can’t patients make up their minds?

They can and they have. Patients want personalization.

Patient communication preferences are influenced by age, income, gender, being the parent/guardian to a child patient, certain disabilities, urban vs. rural location, amongst more. But they are united in looking for tailored experiences.

They want to matter to the healthcare providers. Meeting their doctor is an intensely personal experience. Patients want that to carry over to their communications.

How personalized would you prefer notifications and alerts from your healthcare providers to be?

~70% of people want their communication to be personalized.

COVID-19 caused a ripple

Why this expectation reset though? Why now?

Turns out COVID-19 had a serious impact on patient communications preferences. Digital tools survive and grow in patient journeys as more than just COVID-19 relics.

Telemedicine visits increased by 27.2% in rural areas.^[2] 80% of U.S. adults surveyed in a study strongly preferred virtual waiting rooms.^[3] Our survey respondents picked email as the top channel for receiving pre-appointment intake forms.

How much have your healthcare communication expectations changed since COVID-19?

Over 73% say that their communication expectations have changed in some capacity since the pandemic began.

Patients have warmed up to telehealth and digital tools by necessity since COVID-19

62% of people

are scheduling telehealth appointments since 2020

65% of people

are more comfortable with telehealth appointments now vs. pre-COVID-19

Income and communication preferences

Last year’s survey showed that income determined differences in patient communication preferences. Respondents in income groups below $75K annually tended to prefer conventional modes such as phone calls and text, for communicating with healthcare providers. Those declaring income above $100K seemed more adaptive to new communication modes like online apps.

This year, those differences have reconciled with the same preferences for text and phone emerging across income brackets.

This speaks to accessibility to healthcare, which is an important consideration for providers serving lower-income populations. 97% of U.S. adults own a cell phone (up from 35% just 13 years ago!) and 90% own a smartphone.^[4]

Survey

Building churn-proof patient relationships

Timely and effective patient care doesn’t just improve health outcomes. It also impacts the bottom-line of healthcare providers, affecting how they can serve their patients better.

$150B

of missed appointments
to healthcare providers each year ^[5]

38%

of healthcare employees
are at risk of burnout

39%

of employees
are considering leaving their organization^[6]

Driving people productivity and containing costs, while meeting the demand for value-based healthcare brings digital communication strategy front and center.

Communication realizations:

1. No one channel is key. Offering multiple communication channels is the key to making patients feel heard.
2. Patient preferences can vary as widely as patient populations do.
3. Text messaging is a need-to-have channel for patient engagement but not the cure-all for your communication strategy.
4. Income seems to impact the adoption of new communication modes.

When there are so many variables and preferences, how do you tie them all together into a cohesive patient communication strategy?

By making channel optionality an organic and planned part of your customer experience strategy.

Most healthcare providers already rely on phone calling as a patient touchpoint. The next step is consciously adopting new modes and making them integral to your patient communication strategy.

Optionality as a framework will help healthcare practices accommodate the diverse needs of the patients, leading to consistently successful health outcomes. It’s more than just a concept. It’s a strategy–to keep current patients and attract new ones.