14 reasons why patients are not adopting your health system's Digital Health solution

At SeamlessMD we’ve learned a lot about getting high patient adoption for Digital Health solutions.

But those learnings came from making a TON of mistakes with health systems in the past 12 years… but hopefully we can help you learn from those!

Here are 14 reasons why patients might not be adopting your Digital Health solutions (and what you should fix!):

1. It’s not multichannel.

You have to reach patients in the way they want to be reached. That means being available on mobile app, web app, SMS and email.

2. Your staff is not bought-in and are not promoting it to patients.

Nothing sells itself. If your staff doesn’’t care, neither will your patients.

3. The content (e.g. patient education) doesn’t match what the care team is telling them.

Nothing loses patient confidence more than causing confusion in their care journey.

4. You picked the wrong patient enrollment workflow for your staff.

Does manual enrollment still make sense? Are you better off with  fully automated enrollment via an EHR integration? Or perhaps partially-automated through an embedded enrollment process in the EHR? Or maybe even patient self sign-up?

5. You picked the wrong time to introduce it in the patient journey.

Promoting a Digital Health solution at 6am during an inpatient stay is a bad time…

6. It’s not designed with health literacy in mind.

Is the content writing at a Grade 6 reading level? Are things written in plain language?

7. It’s not designed to be accessible for patients.

Does it meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA guidelines? Is it color blind and contrast-tested? Is it screen reader friendly?

8. It’s not integrated with your patient portal or digital front door.

Every potential access point reduces friction in adoption.

9. It’s not being marketed to its full potential.

Do you have posters on the walls? Do patients get educational brochures? Are you putting out press releases about the initiative? Again, nothing sells itself. The “old school” stuff still works.

10. You don’t allow caregivers to be enrolled in the solution.

Especially for frail, elderly patients, their spouse, son or daughter can be the perfect person to use a Digital Health solution with or on the patient’s behalf.

You don’t actually look at the data and learn from it.

Are you looking at your patient adoption and engagement rates at least once/quarter? Are you reading the feedback about barriers to adoption?

12. It’s not personalized for the patient.

Is the content tailored to the patient’s surgical procedure or health condition? Is the journey tailored to the patient’s demographics and comorbidities? Personalization impacts adherence.

13. The on-boarding process is weak.

Even if patient’s open up the Digital Health product… do they know what to do?

14. Your main staff are bought-in, but you didn’t educate EVERYONE.

When patients ask other staff on the floor about it, many of the staff are unaware. This hurts patient buy-in.

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Want to learn more about best practices for driving high patient enrollment in a Digital Health solution?

‍Click here for a webinar we recently did on the top 4 ways for enrolling patients.

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