How to Not Overcomplicate Your Grateful Patient Strategy
Grateful patient philanthropy — the proactive identification and cultivation of patients and families who want to express gratitude for care received — is at the core of everything we do in health care philanthropy; yet, it is not uncommon to overcomplicate this seemingly simple strategy. Why do we overcomplicate this? First, we treat grateful patients like programs instead of people. For years, we treated this as a program with one person in charge, when patients and families should be engaged in every aspect of our work. Second, no other strategy in health care philanthropy changes as much because so much depends on things outside our control, including patient care processes and busy clinician schedules. Lastly, many of us operate in silos. Annual giving sends post-discharge mailings, major gift officers chase clinician referrals and operations manages large volumes of patient screenings. Everyone is doing important work but when it is not part of one cohesive strategy, things get complicated quickly.
Everyone is doing important work but when it is not part of one cohesive strategy, things get complicated quickly.
Four Ways to Identify and Cultivate Grateful Patient Prospects
To combat this, it is important to go back to the basics. There are four simple ways to proactively identify and cultivate grateful patients.
1. Clinician-Identified
Clinicians remain one of the warmest sources for identifying grateful patient prospects. A physician, nurse or other caregiver hears a patient express gratitude and connects that person with the foundation by making an introduction and alerting the foundation about who to contact.
It is important to remember shrinking lengths of stay and less face time between clinicians and patients mean the ways clinicians make introductions are changing. There are several ways clinicians can identify grateful patients beyond the traditional bedside referral, including reviewing patient lists, conducting tours, helping create invitation lists for small donor events or actively participating in donor cultivation.
2. Data-Identified
Thousands of patients move through a health system every day. Data can help determine which ones are most likely to have a meaningful connection to the organization, the capacity to give and the inclination to be philanthropic to health care.
Accessing HIPAA-compliant patient information and using modern, AI-powered screening tools to help us surface our best prospects is the fastest way to identify prospective grateful patients.
3. Self-Identified
Many patients and families self-identify by seeing a gratitude poster on the wall, scanning a QR code or responding to a post-discharge letter or email. There are several ways to give patients and families an opportunity to express gratitude at key moments in their care journey.
4. Clinical Integration
This may be the most overlooked opportunity of all. Patient experience has become a major priority for health systems, creating more opportunities for patients to recognize their caregivers and share their appreciation. That work creates natural opportunities to engage patients in philanthropy.
Instead of building a separate grateful patient process, plug into what already exists. A nurse manager asking whether a patient would like to recognize someone for their care can create a natural opportunity for the foundation to follow up. So can an electronic medical record alert, a MyChart communication, a QR code at checkout or messaging built into discharge paperwork or routine follow-up.
Integrate into what your health care system has already built instead of building something new on your own.
Find the Gaps in Your Strategy
So what does this look like in practice? Start by picking one service line, such as cardiovascular. Draw four boxes and label them with the four buckets.
Clinician-identified: Who are your clinician partners? How are they identifying grateful patients? How could you expand the ways these clinical partners can identify them?
Data-identified: How are you using patient data to find new prospects? What tools are you using, and are they effective?
Self-identified: What opportunities exist for patients to raise their hand, share their story or gratitude, connect with the foundation or make a gift if they want to?
Clinical integration: What is already happening in the patient journey that you could plug into? Then look at the four boxes. One may be overflowing. Another may be nearly empty. That is useful information. An empty box doesn't mean you need a new program. It means you have found an opportunity. Pick one thing to improve next month and one thing to build this year.
Make It Simpler, Not Bigger
Grateful patient philanthropy will always involve people, relationships and a patient care environment that changes constantly. That is what makes it challenging.
But the answer to that complexity is not more complexity. The strongest strategies are not necessarily the ones with the most programs, technology or processes. They are the ones where everyone understands the goal, sees how their work connects to everyone else's and integrates with existing patient care and patient experience processes across the larger health care organization.
About the Author:
Erin Stitzel, FAHP, is a Principal Consultant for Accordant and a leader in building robust clinician partnerships to advance philanthropy. You can reach her through email at Erin@AccordantHealth.com or through LinkedIn.
Comments