Let’s talk about the realities of population health outreach campaigns to connect with and engage your members. Typically, these communication campaigns rely on telephone and direct mail outreach requiring significant manual efforts, which in turn cost you time and money. Unfortunately, those efforts come with limited success and are not scalable. Additionally, practices and health systems are measured in quality through several metrics, including patient outcomes and patient satisfaction. And what about staff satisfaction?
Staff and patients are often dissatisfied with the inefficiency of office communication workflows. Medical assistants get frustrated when they make phone calls and send mail to remind patients of necessary chronic and preventative care – checking off boxes in the Patient-Centered Medical Home paperwork – but then realizing after all of their effort that they weren’t really making a meaningful impact. Following are some real-life stats that will get our point across.
The Realities of Patient Outreach Inefficiencies
With our client, Adelante Healthcare, their front office staff averaged 37 hours per month making appointment reminder phone calls with a capture rate of only 40 percent. It was frustrating when all the work failed to translate into better care for patients. Additionally, the front offices spent time manually calling patients one day before their scheduled appointments. With low call answer and response rates, their medical clinics were averaging an 18-20 percent no show rate, while their dental practices experienced no show rates as high as 30 percent.
With our client, Fenway Health, they worked diligently to ensure the community was afforded quick and safe testing for COVID-19. Along with the volume of testing offered, their staff was burdened with the manual task of calling each patient to deliver their test results once received from the lab. These manual efforts resulted in varied delivery times based on how long it took staff to reach patients. Often, the issues were phone tag and/or the additional step of logging into a patient portal delayed the delivery of results to patients.
Like many health organizations, these clients felt the pains from these inefficiencies and started realizing negative effects.
The Costs Of Inefficiencies
Let’s face it – the costs of inefficiencies include wasted time from manual outreach with little impact, lost revenue from no shows or screening avoidance, and reduced patient outcomes due to low visit volume and low appointment follow-up. And did you know, 14 billion laboratory tests are ordered annually. How is it even possible to manually reach out with results for each of those patients? It’s not.
And what are the costs of the following?
- Patient portal: these are insufficient. Only 30% of patients register for a portal. The patient portal is more of a passive solution and they often lack proactive features for texting and notification.
- Hard copy test results: these are unsafe, inconvenient for patients, and costly for practices. How much gets misplaced or left behind in cluttered waiting rooms? A JAMA study found 2,687 documents including personal health information with over half containing highly-sensitive information.
- Standard texting/emailing: these are not secure. Systems risk noncompliance with HIPAA regulations. Email can fall behind the patient’s firewall or go into a SPAM folder, can get lost in a mountain of marketing/promotional emails, and sometimes it is difficult to send the PHI securely.
- EHR documentation: these are burdensome for thousands of patients every week. This also lays a heavy burden on clinical staff. Every patient needs to be documented that the results were received. If you’re processing hundreds per day, this could be a full-time job for multiple employees to keep up.
It’s more important now than ever to focus on improving quality outcomes that were negatively impacted during the pandemic. A great place to start is to reach your patient populations where they are in an effective and scalable manner.
Improving Patient Engagement
Providertech partners with healthcare providers to enable a secure and scalable communication platform to reach your populations and deploy your strategy and requirements with our compliance safeguards and industry best practices. With our patient outreach solutions, we are able to:
- Ensure TCPA compliance and HIPAA compliance
- Improve quality measures
- Increase reimbursement and revenue
- Expand patient outreach
- Reduce patient no shows
- Increase patient satisfaction
- Improve operational efficiencies
Want to dig a bit deeper into how it works?
Healthcare Outreach Workflows
It all comes down to our healthcare outreach workflows that are designed by population health experts. We can help you increase appointment volume, outcomes, and revenue by engaging at-risk patients and members throughout the entire care continuum. You can deliver health information, preventative messaging, and treatment compliance to a variety of populations, including patients and members in need of:
- Annual wellness visits
- Cancer screenings
- Chronic disease management
- Laboratory testing
- Medication adherence
- Prenatal and postpartum care
- Smoking cessation
- Age specific vaccinations
Providertech works closely with each of its clients to understand your particular workflows, and then we help you streamline them and increase efficiency through automation that meet your practice’s needs.
Next, we enable real-time patient and clinical team communication with two-way text.
And, we help you engage and triage patients when, where and how it’s convenient for them through automated SMS text and voice options.
“In addition to reduced no show rates, our front office operations have benefited from the appointment reminder solution because we no longer have to spend time manually calling patients to remind them of upcoming visits. The solution has also greatly reduced call backs at our call centers, which frees up our phone lines for more urgent patient calls.”
–Jodi Shephardson, Director of Support Services
Adelante Healthcare
Successful Patient Outcomes
All of these workflows and automations come down to this – what results are actually happening? Instead of us tooting our own horns, we’d love for you to hear directly from some of our clients about the results they are realizing.
CHRISTUS Health System wanted to increase lung cancer screening rates for eligible patients. By implementing CareCommunity via text messaging, they were able to generate significantly more shared decision-making visits. These led to an increased number of lung cancer screening in just three months with multiple patients being identified in early, treatable phases of the disease process.
“We’ve already begun to see promising results thanks to Providertech’s commitment and expertise in using technology to improve patient outcomes. We are pleased to partner with a forward-thinking company that serves as a professional and trustworthy partner in guiding new models for engaging patients in their health.”
–Suman K. Sinha, MD, MS, MBA, FCCP, FACP
Chief, Pulmonary Medicine, Christus Trinity Clinic
Fenway Health wanted to reduce time to deliver test results. By implementing CareCommunity, they were able to deliver test results within minutes of receiving them in the EHR, with over 80% of patients accessing their results within 15 minutes of receiving the text. By automating COVID-19 test results delivery for individuals, staff was freed up to focus on patients with positive results who required additional support and scale the volume of people who were tested in person.
“Providertech’s big vision allows us to continue expanding scalable text messaging which helps us deliver the highest quality care and improve outcomes in and beyond our communities – without overburdening our staff.”
–Chris Grasso, Assistant VP of Informatics and Data Analytics
Fenway Health
Adelante Healthcare wanted to increase access to care and improve clinical outcomes in order to achieve value-based targets and enhance population health. By implementing CareCommunity, they were able to realize a 7.5% increase in colorectal cancer screenings and 10% month over month well child appointment increase for children ages 3-6 within a segment of health plans.
“Our population health outreach team spends far less time calling patients who are due for appointments since we’ve automated appointment reminders for wellness visits and cancer screenings. And, we’ve been able to connect with significantly more patients since we can easily scale our communication efforts.”
–Dr. Karuppana, Medical Director of Quality
Adelante Healthcare
Learn how Providertech’s experts can help you reduce wasted time, recover lost revenue, and restore patient outcomes. Rewatch our recent webinar detailing this topic.
