No one knows patient care better than the doctors, nurses, and support professionals on the frontlines of hospitals, clinics, and other medical practices, instituting or improving the latest clinical best practices. Other improvements are about overhauling or refining operational processes, with the help of technology, or focusing on the softer side of care.

While growing revenue and reducing costs remain top of mind for financial leaders at healthcare providers, 60% of the executives who responded to a recent Healthcare Financial Management Association survey cited improving the patient experience as a top priority. This article will lay out 13 areas they should pay special attention to.

Key Takeaways

  • For many healthcare organizations, improving patient care is as important to the business as cutting costs or increasing revenue.
  • Efforts to improve patient care emphasize what happens in the doctor’s visit, including improving communications and working on bedside manner.
  • Telehealth, remote monitoring, and AI technology can help healthcare organizations deliver patient care outside of the hospital or doctor’s office.
  • Care benefits from data and applications that provide a 360-degree view of patients.

13 Strategies to Improve Patient Care in 2025

Improving patient experiences is one of the biggest challenges in the healthcare industry. Steps to improve it include sharing more information during appointments, emphasizing a more collaborative care experience, addressing patient safety and care quality, and empowering patients to better manage their own health. Here is a closer look at what it takes to execute 13 common strategies.

1. Patient-centered care: According to a Harris Poll/American Academy of Physician Associates survey from 2023, nearly two-thirds of Americans find managing their healthcare overwhelming and wish physicians, nurses, and other clinical staff took more time to understand them. The goal of patient-centered care is to improve individual health experiences and outcomes by partnering with patients.

One of the most important steps is to proactively involve patients and their caregivers (family members or other loved ones who help manage their care) in all of their healthcare decisions. This means encouraging patients and non-clinical caregivers to ask questions, ensuring that they understand a diagnosis or prescription. It also involves finding ways to help patients access care and involving them in major decisions, such as whether to move forward with an elective surgery or new treatment plan.

2. Preventive care: The Healthy People 2030 initiative under the federal Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion aims to increase access to many types of preventive care. These include screening for cancer and Type 2 diabetes risks, providing regular dental care, and helping people manage their high cholesterol, weight, or blood pressure.

Unfortunately, use of preventive care services has been declining, mostly because of lack of awareness, cost, and limited access to nearby services. Hospitals, health systems, and community clinics can address these issues through ongoing education about preventive services, especially health screenings or vaccinations available to patients at no cost. Making both clinical and office staff part of these conversations helps increase the likelihood that patients will access the resources they need.

3. Clear communication: Even individuals who read and write well in English can struggle to understand medical terminology and statistics. In many instances, patients are asked to grasp a diagnosis, treatment plan, or prescription at a time when they may be scared or confused about their health and future.

When communicating with patients, medical professionals should seek to simplify complex terms and courses of treatment, while giving patients and their caregivers adequate time to ask questions. One way to help patients understand is to ask them to repeat back the information that was shared. Telephone, email, or telehealth follow-up conversations can also be valuable.

4. Interdisciplinary collaboration: Meanwhile, healthcare organizations should encourage and improve communication among clinical staff members. Such interdisciplinary collaboration has been linked to improved outcomes, such as increased patient satisfaction, higher care quality, and fewer preventable medical errors.

5. Evidence-based practice: Clinical guidelines based on peer-reviewed medical research help care teams provide a more effective care experience, make certain that patients’ many needs are met, and help minimize risks, such as medical errors and adverse events. These guidelines can impact care delivery in everything from treating patients with organ failure in the operating room to measuring temperature and blood pressure in a pediatrician’s office.

Applying the latest evidence to the practice of medicine involves determining the goal of a treatment decision, acquiring and analyzing evidence, making an evidence-based decision, and assessing the outcomes of the decision. Some evidence is considered more reliable than others. For example, evidence from a randomized control trial is generally regarded as more reliable than a quality-designed control trial, which itself is considered more reliable than the viewpoint of a group of experts.

6. Continuous education and training: Education is critical for staying up to date on the latest in evidence-based guidelines on surgeries and other medical procedures. For example, recommendations for treating sports-related concussions have changed in recent years, as have treatment options for sleep apnea. Practitioners who are unaware of these advances may not be making the best treatment decisions for their patients.

Healthcare professionals can keep their knowledge up to date by subscribing to relevant journals, attending conferences and seminars, and completing continuing education courses. In fact, such coursework is often a requirement for practitioners to maintain clinical licenses. Online options for continuing education have grown in popularity, as they make training more readily available and less costly.

7. Use of technology: Healthcare organizations increasingly recognize technology’s value in improving patient care. In a recent survey of healthcare executives, respondents cited care coordination, telehealth, remote patient monitoring, and patient self-scheduling as the top digital health technology priorities across hospitals and health systems, edging out applications used for back-office purposes, such as revenue cycle management.

Applications and portals make it easier for patients to view their health records, track their vital signs, and communicate with their clinicians. They also help medical teams better coordinate care, share information, and make evidence-based decisions. Organizations seeking to leverage these types of technologies often benefit from ERP systems that provide a real-time, holistic view of patient care.

8. Quality improvement initiatives: More than 20 years ago, the Institute of Medicine defined six domains of healthcare quality: safety, effectiveness, patient-centricity, timeliness, efficiency, and equity. These domains serve as a foundation for assessing care quality and helping both government agencies and patients determine a health system’s capacity to provide high-quality care.

Quality improvement efforts aim to analyze the cause of medical errors in many forms—from poor communication and incorrect diagnoses to improper use of medical equipment and medications—and help providers implement policies to promote intervention and prevention in future cases. These initiatives are critical for process and outcomes improvement; they require a clear goal for quality improvement, as well as well-defined and measurable metrics for tracking improvement over time. Buy-in from executive leadership and front-line clinical staff is essential for success.

9. Patient safety protocols: Safety and quality improvements often go hand in hand. Fall prevention is a common example, as the various safety measures that decrease the risk of falls in a hospital or long-term care setting also lead to better patient outcomes.

Along with taking steps to prevent falls, common patient safety protocols include instituting best practices for administering medications, controlling infections, maintaining a clean environment, and monitoring vital signs and symptoms in real time. Maintaining adequate clinician staffing levels is also related to patient safety.

10. Cultural competence: The Health Policy Institute defines cultural competence in healthcare as the ability of providers to integrate factors such as race, ethnicity, nationality, language, gender, socioeconomic status, physical and mental ability, sexual orientation, and occupation into their delivery of case. When it comes to race and ethnicity in particular, there are three important (and related) reasons for healthcare organizations to strive to deliver culturally competent care: Racial and ethnic minorities are projected to exceed half of the US population by 2050, they’re disproportionately burdened by chronic illnesses, and they’re less likely than the general population to have a regular doctor or adequate health insurance.

Healthcare organizations can take several steps to improve patient care, including taking the time to learn about the cultural norms of the populations they serve, recruiting a more diverse staff, partnering with community-based organizations, and exploring ways to increase minority groups’ access to care. Additionally, efforts to improve access to non-English resources should extend beyond interpreters during clinical encounters, to billing, scheduling, and educational materials.

11. Patient education and empowerment: Healthcare organizations need to move beyond simply communicating with patients to educating them about their conditions and showing them how to manage those conditions. Medication management is a common practice. Patients with multiple chronic conditions likely take many medications at different times each day, so it’s important to get them on a schedule and show them how to administer their medications or identify ones they may no longer need.

Additional steps may include providing educational resources prior to an appointment, actively involving non-clinical caregivers in conversations about treatment plans, coordinating follow-up appointments or referrals, and incorporating preventive care and self-management into treatment plans. Together, these processes help patients feel included in the care process, keeping them engaged throughout treatment and recovery.

12. Care coordination and transition management: Sharing information and coordinating care are vital whenever patients are discharged from the hospital, whether to their homes or to long-term care facilities. At a minimum, discharge summaries and relevant treatment plans need to be shared with patients, caregivers, and clinical care teams. Arrangements with transitional care specialists may be needed; often, these require referrals or prior authorization from an insurer.

Increasingly, patients are being discharged with remote monitoring devices to track vital signs or measure weight, blood pressure, or blood glucose levels. Clinical teams need the resources—and the time—to show patients how the devices work, how to share information, and whom to contact when systems need troubleshooting.

13. Emotional support and empathy: Showing respect, gratitude, and empathy go a long way toward making a patient feel welcome and comfortable at the doctor’s office. Practitioners who listen to patients’ concerns and react appropriately to the emotions they’re experiencing are better able to build trust with their patients. When patients receive this type of passionate, patient-centered care, they are, in turn, more likely to listen to their care teams and respond positively to their recommendations.

How Technology Helps Improve Patient Care

Technology is vital to supporting the many clinical and operational workflows that make it possible to improve patient care. The following are common use cases.

  • Patient portals tied to EHR systems make it easy for patients to view their test results and other records, set up and cancel appointments, complete paperwork, and communicate with their care teams. Such portals often include messaging systems on which patients can ask questions of their clinicians and, for example, attach photos of an affected area of the body. As a result, it’s easier for patients to become more engaged in their care.
  • Remote monitoring systems helps patients track vital signs at home and alert care teams in the event of abnormal readings that require attention. These systems have been shown to reduce hospital readmissions for recently discharged patients.
  • EHR systems and other care management tools help coordinate care and share information among interdisciplinary care teams, helping improve collaborative decision-making, especially for patients who multiple specialists for chronic conditions.
  • ERP modules, such as for customer relationship management and marketing automation, can help organizations communicate broadly with patients about upcoming services for which they’re eligible. Additionally, ERP modules focused on workforce management help ensure healthcare business units have adequate staffing levels to meet safety and quality standards for patient care.

The Future of Patient Care

Healthcare organizations are turning to emerging technologies to improve patient care and their operations. Through a combination of video calls, biometric monitoring, and home visits, for example, patients can receive care in their homes, where they can recover in a familiar setting and with a reduced risk of hospital-acquired infections.

Many care providers are also exploring applications of AI, in large part to alleviate clinical staff from the burden of nonclinical work that can contribute to employee burnout. Some are using text-creating generative AI to help communicate with patients about nonurgent medical matters, such as prescription refills. Others are using ambient AI scribe tools to take notes during appointments and provide visit summaries. Physicians report high satisfaction with these tools because they let the doctors focus more on their patients instead of the computer during appointments.

Healthcare organizations are also starting to use AI to analyze medical records and images to provide diagnostic and clinical decision support. Here, the goal is to enhance the valuable expertise of well-trained physicians, not to encourage AI models to take over decision-making outright. To be most effective, these AI tools need to be integrated into the clinical applications physicians are already using.

Empower Your Team to Improve Patient Care With NetSuite

Efforts to improve patient care depend on access to accurate, up-to-date information. Front-line staff need to know a patient’s current diagnosis and status so they can make informed decisions about treatment plans. Meanwhile, leadership teams need to track progress on quality and safety metrics and whether they have enough—or the right—staff to provide the care their patients need.

NetSuite’s cloud-based ERP system offers an integrated suite of applications for managing core business processes and providing access to key data from across the organization. For healthcare, this means gaining a longitudinal view of patients, enabling better decision-making at the point of care and ongoing education and engagement once patients have left the hospital. NetSuite helps healthcare providers move the needle on improving patient care, without disrupting clinical workflows or replacing existing technology tools.

For most hospitals, health systems, and clinics, improving patient care is at least as important as boosting revenue and cutting costs. There are many strategies for improving care. Some put emphasis on the doctor’s visit; others focus on educating and supporting patients when they’re away from the hospital or doctor’s office. Technology plays a vital role in both supporting clinical staff and empowering patients.

How to Improve Patient Care FAQs

What are 7 ways to improve patient satisfaction?

The seven most common ways for healthcare providers to improve patient satisfaction are to communicate clearly, practice evidence-based medicine, educate patients, deliver culturally competent care, emphasize patient safety, improve care coordination, and use technology wherever appropriate.

What does it mean to improve patient care?

Improving patient means helping patients understand their diagnoses and treatment plans. It means respecting patients and listening to their concerns. It means promoting patient safety and care quality in the clinical setting. It means using technology to help patients access care and information and to help care teams make evidence-based decisions at the point of care.

How do nurses improve patient care?

Given their role on the front line of care delivery, nurses are well-positioned to provide patient-centered care, offer emotional support, and ensure that patients understand their diagnoses and treatment plans. Nurses also improve care by effectively communicating with other members of a patient’s medical team about their symptoms, status, temperament, and overall experience in the clinical setting.