Every business within healthcare needs an integrated communication platform that connects digital channels (texting, secure messaging, secure video), impacts workflows and is agnostic to legacy applications. The platform must be interoperable to create scale and capacity in order to deliver sustainable Patient value, drive revenue and lower communication costs.
The basic tenets of a strategy revolve around Patient Acquisition, Patient Management and Patient Retention.
Patient Acquisition:
How will the organization ingest new and existing Patients into an environment by which voice can be diminished and reserved for complex engagement while digital engagement predominates creating scale, capacity, revenue, lower costs and ultimately doing more with less. Acquiring patients requires attention on where the current Patient exists and how new Patients are acquired. A complete understanding of TCPA, HIPAA, application of a business associate agreement, Campaign Registry is an imperative. Population segmentation becomes a valuable consideration in order to best develop short- and long-term messaging and workforce management practices. Simple things like assessing if a cell phone has been identified and collected with consent, along with key Patient attributes such as birthdate and gender can ultimately elevate success.
Patient Management:
Once a Patient has successfully enrolled in a platform, workflows are dissected to understand how messaging may improve the associated outcomes of each. Messaging must be created that is relevant, personal and non-redundant. It must elicit the desired response or effectively change the behavior of the Patient in order to be perceived as valuable both to patient and the business. Timing and persistence become important in order to maximize the effectiveness of a messaging campaign. Platform characteristics include bulk loading of Patients, manual loading of Patients, capturing of key demographics and attributes of the Patient, workforce management preparation, and effective Welcome Messages. Texting must be used to deliver secure web-based applications as it has a higher adoptability than mobile applications.
Patient Retention:
Response management may be the most critical component when deploying digital channels. Unlike voice, where if the connection is not made and voicemail is initiated response is often slow by the Patient and may be non-existent from the business. Digital messaging lives in perpetuity on the phone of a Patient, most often responded to within 90 seconds, with a required reciprocity to match. As such a combination of user response, machine learning and bot technology becomes more than table stakes. Messaging must be conspicuous to both enrollee and user. Digital channels must be accessible and seamless to both Patient and user. For example, texting must seamlessly roll into synchronous and asynchronous secure messaging, secure video and where applicable secure web-based applications. All messaging must be seen logically and historically in order to understand the engagement and Patient experience. The digital environment must be supported with analytics that are in the domains of transactional, sentiment and outcomes. It is in the confluence of these domains that a business best understands their Digital Ecosystem.
