Being proactive about keeping patients engaged and on time for physicals, health screenings and follow-up appointments – it’s the key to growing visit volume, and more importantly, delivering better outcomes and creating healthier communities.
Certainly, the last couple of decades have seen incredible progress toward care and reimbursement models that focus on preventing illness as much as treating illness. However, in recent years we’ve seen some rollback. COVID was a major disruptor of course, as it temporarily forced a movement away from seeking healthcare that wasn’t considered essential or immediately necessary. But the problem runs deeper than that. What experts are seeing now is a decrease in uptake of preventive services coupled with an increase in chronic disease prevalence and severity. These trends signal the need for medical practice providers and other health leaders to invest in preventive health campaigns.
As frontline healthcare providers, primary and specialty care practices have a great opportunity to serve as pillars of strength and community-based health resources. They can inform the public about healthy lifestyles, disease prevention, nutrition, physical activity and mental health prevention options. Through effective preventive health campaigns, providers and practices can educate and engage consumers with the goal of reducing disease incidence and lowering healthcare costs while improving overall health outcomes for the communities they serve.
“Chronic barriers include lack of awareness about what preventive services are recommended and myriad social determinants such as cost, not having a primary care provider, living too far from providers, or lacking adequate transportation — just to name a few. To improve access to clinical preventive services at population scales, we must recognize and address the many variables that affect people’s awareness of such services and increase their willingness and ability to seek them.”
