3 Tips To Build Patient Trust With Software

Editor’s note: Do you find it difficult to build patient trust that can help improve the quality of care? In this article, Alena gives 3 tips on how to build long-term relationships with patients and gain their loyalty with software. Read on and feel free to turn to our medical IT consultants to get answers to your questions about building patient trust with high-quality software solutions.

ScienceSoft’s clients from the healthcare industry often ask me for advice on how to nurture patient trust with the help of technology, as they see that trust contributes to improving patient satisfaction rates, reducing readmission, and increasing economic outcomes. Below, I share 3 tips on how to build patient trust with software that have already helped ScienceSoft’s clients from the healthcare industry.

Let Your Patients Reach Out to You From Wherever They Are

My consulting practice shows that patient trust is likely to rise with the increase in your services’ accessibility. Now, when the importance and demand for remote services have never been higher, you can provide your care services without physical interaction using a telemedicine application. With the telemedicine app, you can provide real-time remote consultations and organize e-visits via video chat. To see how it works, check our project on designing HIPAA-compliant native mobile telemedicine apps for a US healthcare IT provider.

Also, telemedicine apps allow renewing prescriptions, filling out medical forms, and going through other formal procedures without visiting a doctor.

Additionally, telemedicine apps can be enriched with medical chatbot technology. Chatbots can search for needed medical information, handle simple patient requests, and send notifications about upcoming e-visits, thus streamlining care processes, increasing care availability, and helping patients with the treatment routine.

Keep Patients Engaged

Another way to build patient trust that I suggest to healthcare organizations is to engage patients in the process of their treatment, which can help patients feel like one team with their care provider. For that, you can develop a mobile healthcare app that provides patients with their treatment plans and reliable information about their vitals (including body temperature, blood pressure, pulse, breathing rate, etc.). You can get an idea of how such an app may look from ScienceSoft’s project on designing a care coordination app.

Also, you can enable the app to notify patients to take medicine and monitor their diet. And you can add gamification features to the app and encourage patients to improve awareness of their diseases and treatment procedures with quizzes and tests. Try this patient application demo to see how it looks in real life.

Keep Communication Open

I recommend healthcare organizations to be more transparent in their dealings with patients. For that, the potential of a patient portal cannot be underestimated. Thus, one of the ways to build trust with a patient portal is to enable patients to publicly leave feedback regarding doctors and other medical personnel and the general quality of services on the provider’s website. Such an opportunity to look at your services through patients’ eyes can help you improve the quality of care. Your patients can also use a portal to communicate with medical staff sharing their concerns and discussing the questions related to their diseases. Moreover, you can create a space allowing patients to discuss, for example, their treatment process or choose doctors according to the rating. This will make patients sure that their opinion is important for a healthcare provider.

According to Edelman's report, most patients feel cared for when their providers use an empathetic tone. Feedback collection, like any clinical interaction, should be guided by empathy to encourage meaningful responses. When patient surveys are thoughtfully designed and easy to engage with, they can become a powerful tool for improving services and strengthening patient trust. Digital tools can help providers bring empathy into every interaction, even when those interactions are screen-based. A good example of this is the Cleveland Clinic’s experience with a patient survey tool designed around the principles of digital empathy. After implementing the solution, they saw a 42% increase in patient participation. The depth and richness of responses improved, too. Those who previously stuck to rating scales began sharing detailed, thoughtful feedback through open-ended questions, giving care teams a much more nuanced understanding of patient experiences.

Make Sure Your Trust-Building Efforts Pay Off

I recommend establishing specific metrics to monitor trust levels over time. This will help you understand if your efforts are paying off. There are specialized tools, such as the Trust in Physician Scale or the Trust in My Doctor Scale, that aim to reveal how patients perceive their provider’s communication competency, fairness, and overall trustworthiness. But many organizations opt for more operational metrics. For instance, you can track how often patients return for care, stick to treatment plans, or use patient portals to identify trust-related factors. A combination of these indicators creates a bigger picture of where you stand and what needs work. Below, you can find a set of commonly used indirect metrics that help quantify and interpret patient trust in healthcare settings.

Just Gain Your Patients’ Trust!

Now, high-quality software is one of the prerequisites for building long-term relationships with patients and gaining their trust. If you want to ensure that the software you use is up for the task or are interested in introducing any software type mentioned in the article, just let me know.