Essential metrics that support better patient engagement

How key metrics in patient engagement can improve health outcomes and patient satisfaction

For busy healthcare practices, few priorities rank higher than improving patient outcomes. Now evidence is mounting that shows a clear link between patient engagement and better health.

Patients who actively participate in the delivery and management of their own care are hospitalized less often, enjoy a higher quality of life, and are more satisfied with their patient experience.¹ When it comes to chronic disease, engaged patients may even live longer than unengaged peers who receive similar treatment.²

Proof points like these are sparking healthcare practitioners to assess their own levels of patient engagement. If you're seeking to enhance your patient engagement maturity, here are some top metrics you can use to track patient engagement and experience.

The ways to patient engagement

Patient engagement is a practical measure of how effectively patients participate in their own care. It reflects not just what happens during a visit, but what happens between visits, where outcomes are often determined.

With the proper key performance indicators (KPIs), you can track how well your patients understand their health, follow treatment plans, interact with your practice, and raise concerns before small issues can escalate. Tracking patient engagement can also help support value-based care (VBC) programs by providing you with tangible metrics about the quality of the care you deliver.

Taken together, this data can provide insights into which patients are thriving, which may be at risk, and where the patient experience may be falling short. Here are some of the metrics you can use to unlock those insights:

1. Patient portal usage

In recent years, healthcare portals have become a key element of patient-centered care. These secure websites and/or apps let you enhance communication with patients, streamline appointment management, improve care coordination, and support prescription accuracy. And the more frequently patients interact with these portals, the more engaged they are. To measure engagement with your patient portal, aim to track KPIs such as:

• How frequently patients log in to access their health information
• The number of appointments booked, confirmed, rescheduled, or cancelled
• How often patients use the portal to communicate with their care teams

2. Appointment attendance rates

When patients miss their appointments, it does more than impact your practice's efficiency. It also has negative effects on their health. Patients with high no-show rates are less likely to complete preventive screenings, tend to rely more on emergency department care, and struggle to manage their chronic diseases.³ Additionally, missing medical appointments can impact continuity of care, leading to lower patient satisfaction.⁴

Measuring appointment attendance rates can help you boost patient engagement by identifying and closing those gaps. Core metrics to track include:

• The number of appointments attended, missed, and cancelled
• No-show rates among various patient cohorts
• Effect of automated appointment reminders on attendance rates

3. Communication effectiveness

One of the hallmarks of patient-centered care is that it respects and responds to patients' preferences, needs, and values — and patient-centered communication sits at its heart.⁵ This is full-scale, operational patient engagement, and it's key to assessing your communication effectiveness. You should consider:

• How frequently patients communicate in-person, by phone, and digitally
• The number of messages exchanged on your patient portal
• The number of complaints your practice receives
• How long it takes to respond to feedback and resolve complaints

4. Patient satisfaction scores

Beyond behavior-based metrics — like patient portal usage, appointment attendance rates, and communication effectiveness — patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) shine a light on personal perceptions of patient engagement. Patient satisfaction scores play a central role in this regard. To get an inside look at how engaged your patients feel, consider administering annual surveys to determine how satisfied your patients are with:

• The overall patient experience, including whether they feel their needs are being met
• Appointment scheduling, wait times, and staff responsiveness
• Communication practices, from explaining the initial treatment plan to instructions for follow-up care

5. Patient activation scores

The Patient Activation Measure (PAM) is a validated tool that helps practitioners assess how prepared patients are to manage their own healthcare. Patients who are more activated typically adopt healthier behaviors, realize better clinical outcomes, and require fewer costly interventions⁶ — results that align with higher patient engagement.

Through a series of questions, patients indicate:

• Whether they feel overwhelmed about managing their health
• Whether they lack knowledge or confidence to act
• Whether they are taking steps to improve their health
• How prepared they are to stay the course, even under stress⁷

Enhancing patient engagement maturity

Although the correlation between patient engagement and improved health outcomes is clear, some healthcare practitioners still face difficulty enhancing their patient engagement maturity. Challenges range from concerns around the time commitment required to elevate service levels, to uncertainty around how to improve the patient experience, to language barriers that hinder effective patient communication.

Yet, overcoming these obstacles may be easier than you think. In fact, the right tools and technologies can help support operational patient engagement measurement to deliver tangible, data-driven results, strengthening your ability to:

• Empower patient self-service. With access to the athenaOne® Patient Portal and/or mobile app, your patients can self-schedule and manage appointments, self-check-in, pay online, and communicate with their care team — activities that all help increase patient engagement while also reducing clinical administrative workloads.
• Increase appointment attendance rates. Automated appointment reminders and flexible scheduling options help reduce no-shows, while embedded telehealth capabilities reduce access barriers, making it easier to provide patients with meaningful care tailored to their needs and preferences.
• Communicate more effectively. athenaOne's automated outreach messaging helps close care gaps with appointment reminders, treatment plan follow-ups, and other important notifications. Its multilingual functionality lets you communicate clearly and compassionately with patients from diverse backgrounds. You can even create your own messaging campaigns to contact specific patient populationsul with relevant, targeted communications at scale.

By encouraging patients to actively participate in their own healthcare management, ongoing interactions like these help improve adherence to treatment plans, support timely interventions, and foster stronger patient relationships. Plus, AI-native software streamlines time-consuming tasks to reduce administrative burdens. The result? Less work to drive higher engagement levels.

Turning patient engagement metrics into practical results

Patient engagement remains a critical determinant of healthcare outcomes. By adopting relevant patient engagement metrics, you can gain greater insight into your engagement scores and take concrete steps to raise them. athenaOne makes it easier with embedded tools and features purpose-built to drive higher levels of patient engagement.

Learn how one practice used athenahealth's tools to boost patient engagement and satisfaction, along with strategies to improve your growth.