Show Value by Increasing Patient Well-Visits to Your Providers

As the country opens back up and health systems re-open their doors to elective surgeries, doctors have noticed a disturbing trend. Patients are skipping not only their routine doctor visits for chronic conditions like diabetes or high blood pressure, but they are also putting off screenings and other preventative care – like vaccinations. Because of this, doctors are urging patients, that despite COVID, they must keep up with their healthcare needs.

Data from the Vaccines for Children program showed a decline of 2.5 million doses of regular childhood vaccines and about 250,000 declines in doses of measles vaccine. A separate study done by the CDC says that vaccination rates dropped from about 64.4% of children between 2016 to 2019 to 49.7% in May of 2020. Even among older children, non-influenza vaccination rates declined by 21.5% according to the study.

While this is probably not new news to any of you in the healthcare field, what may be new are some ideas on how you can use this type of information to help doctors get their patients back into the practice.

One Children’s Hospital in the Midwest used the information to develop a social media campaign to support their community providers, while helping to raise the spirits of all the front lines care-givers of this pandemic. Check out this week’s Friday from the Field video to see this creative approach and perhaps adapt it to fit your organization. The message applies to children and adults.