The patient portal in your optometric practice provides many benefits for your patients. With your patient portal, your patients can securely send and receive messages, schedule appointments, complete pre-appointment paperwork, receive appointment summaries, and more.
There’s only one problem—getting your patients to use the patient portal. While some of your patients may be tech-savvy and eager to adopt the web-based portal, other patients may not fully see the benefit of the solution or forget about it because they’re used to the way they’ve always done things.
This post explores a few ways you can encourage your patients to use your practice’s patient portal.
3 Strategies For Increasing Patient Portal Usage In Your Optometric Practice
Ask
Sometimes all you have to do to get a patient to start using your patient portal is ask them. Whether you ask the patient in person or through a patient recall message, you can persuade a lot of your patients to use the portal with little effort.
Promote At Every Opportunity
Not all of your patients will be as responsive to your initial request for them to use the patient portal. For patients who are more cautious about using the portal or seem hesitant, you’ll have to promote the benefits of the portal at every opportunity.
During a patient’s exam, there are many opportunities to promote your practice’s patient portal. If you’re talking to a patient about a diagnosis and treatment plan, you can show them how to access the patient portal to review patient education materials and review the summary. Another example of a way you can promote the patient portal during the exam is at check out. At check out, you can remind the patient that they can schedule their exam online in the portal, review information from past exams, and fill out pre-appointment paperwork to reduce wait-time.
Give Incentives
If you’re still having trouble getting patients to adopt your patient portal, another tactic you could try is using incentives. Offering incentives for patients to access your patient portal could help drive utilization and could also help you promote different benefits of the portal.
Think of incentives that your community would find valuable. Some examples of incentives you could try include:
- Gift cards for the next five people that schedule an exam using the portal
- A percentage off a second pair of frames after using the secure messaging features
- A quarterly drawing for patients who log into their portal during the quarter
Peek at our patient portal in this video.
