Technology has taken over all our lives where we have become too dependant on the former. Technology is no more a need, it a necessity. People have shifted to using their phones for any form of medical aide rather than visiting a doctor’s clinic. Here are the 5 emerging healthcare trends of 2018.

• Investment in the patient’s portal
  

A Patient portal is an online website or application that is connected to EHR and makes the patient’s life easy and accessible to the health data provided by the specialized doctors. These tools give patients a look into various data points, including lab results, physician notes, their health histories, discharge summaries, and immunizations.

In an era of online shopping, online banking and everything being accessed through the use of any form of digital medium, it came as no surprise that the healthcare industry too was being forged into the online world. In today’s competitive digital world, healthcare digital marketing has become very important and necessary.Patient portals can help patients take a more active role in their health care and control the way their information is managed. Hence, the need for improvement in the patient’s portal.This is something that can be helped by the best digital healthcare patient portal in India.

Here are 7 ways to improve the patient’s portal:

1. Standardize the experience
2. Persistence is the key
3. Make it less work
4. Emphasize privacy feature
5. Share the best healthcare practices
6. Make it worthwhile for them
7. Keep up with the innovation.

• Voice over SEO

Voice search is already accounting for 20% of all searches and will make their way into the healthcare industry. Many people now prefer searching for healthcare solutions through voice searches rather than the traditional way of text searching. For e.g. when people are using the text search they prefer writing short words for finding a solution to their healthcare query whereas people prefer using the natural language when conducting a Voice Search. Hence, the marketers now have to focus on the generalized topic rather than the specific keywords.

As the popularity of voice search continues to rise, here’s how medical marketers can adapt their SEO strategies in order to stay ahead of the competition.

Today, voice search is the fastest-growing type of search. Google’s Mobile Voice study found that “55% of teens and 41% of adults use voice search more than once a day.” The report also states that 20% of searches on mobile apps are now voice searches. In reality, the total number is actually much higher when you compare it with the use of Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Siri, which are all voice search apps.

There are 3 ways in which you can improve the voice search feature:

1. Content: Use more of natural and conversational language and tone that answers the questions generally asked by the patients/ consumers. The website healthcare marketing content in the era of voice search should be based more on the general topic rather than the specific keywords.
2. User content: Always try to keep in mind the intent behind each question asked by the patient while developing and designing the website.
3. Structured data: Using structured data can help the search engines understand and crawl your site more efficiently when building their knowledge graph for voice search.

• Content

Healthcare content marketing has been one of the most essential digital marketing strategies in this competitive online industry. Healthcare content has been the second most searched content in the Google search algorithms. Developing content that answers the patient’s queries is the key to writing valuable and essential content for your website.

It is very important to keep a check on the content development as it is one of the most important factors to be looked after while designing a website. If the content seems irrational to the patient, the patient might end up leaving that page. Hence it is important to know the customer and the intent behind the question asked by the former while developing content. When the content is rational enough, it might help the patient in many ways leading to generating traffic on the website, and the best Healthcare Content developmentwill certainly help.

• Social Engagement

Times have changed in the past few decades. Now following your doctor on Facebook isn’t as bizarre as it was a few years. All the healthcare providers now have understood the need and the importance of having a social media presence in order to interact with their target audience.

Nowadays, people have shifted to making videos and explaining to the audience the importance of having a healthy lifestyle. Testimonials can also be posted through the use of videos. Thanks to the live streaming feature where patients can also ask the healthcare providers questions relating to their health.

Top hospitals using social media: Apollo hospital, Fortis hospital, Manipal healthcare, Narayana hospital, etc.

• Chatbots

Technology is reshaping the healthcare industry. While doctors and researchers push the boundaries of medicine, advances in technology are changing the way patients and doctors communicate with each other and how care is administered. Chatbots is a revolutionary technology that is transforming the medical history.

The basic fundamental thought behind the creation of Chatbot was to remove the need to visit a medical professional for all those small concerns and cases that required self-care.

Chatbots are designed to learn from thousands of interactions in order to increase the accuracy of their disease recognition. The goal is to be able to help people in less time and for less money than it would take to see a medical professional.

In conclusion, in order to keep up with the fast pace of the emerging healthcare industry, it is essential for one to keep a check on the emerging trends and adapt to them as well in order to be successful. Here, 5 emerging trends have been mentioned which are reshaping the face of the medical industry. A medical professional’s job does not just end at owning a clinic or a hospital to aide his patients. It has gone beyond. In this fast-moving industry, one does not have the time to visit a clinic for small self-required concerns. Hence, the need to aide patients technologically.

Some clinics, hospitals & doctors also use the digital medium in order to be known by the people. Hence the need of having a social media presence. As we all know that  Change is constant. Professionals have to adapt well to the changing environment in order to be at the top of their game.