Chapter 2

Transform end-to-end health engagement

Close care gaps by creating personalized, scalable experiences throughout the wellness journey

Providers and community health organizations are all concerned with closing care gaps and moving from treatment to prevention. However, the process is complex, involving direct patient engagement with doctors, pharmacies, and insurance companies. Each of these stakeholders is invested in supporting patients with critical services along their wellness journey.

Additionally, vulnerable populations may lack continuity of care due to factors including age, physical access, or life circumstances, all of which can affect adherence to treatment plans. A range of technological solutions can help fill the gaps, including telehealth platforms, coordinated appointment management, scheduling and triaging, and prescription refill reminders. But there is no one-size-fits-all fix.

Robust engagement plans support follow-through such as patients filling (and then consistently taking) their prescriptions, keeping up with suggested exercises, making recommended dietary changes, and continually monitoring their health indicators. Personalized communication throughout the healthcare process can help all patients better adhere to such plans.

Personalization is key to engagement

Treatments and wellness programs are tailored to a patient’s unique situation, and patient communications should be too, in terms of content, channel, and timing. While an annual checkup reminder might be invaluable for a parent with small children, that same reminder becomes unwelcome noise if it lands in an inbox after the kids have left for college.

There are many documented studies of well-timed digital “nudges,” moving patients to take the next recommended steps to improve their health outcomes. Techniques like gamification and incentivization have been shown to help people increase physical activity and improve diabetes management. An approach called “automated hovering” — which blends technological outreach, such as carefully calibrated SMS messaging, with telemedicine calls with providers — is proving to be an important way to begin closing care gaps.

Secured data warehouses.

Bringing a voice to the data

Icario is taking lessons and strategies used by retail to create engagement that motivates people to take positive actions for their health. The platform combines behavioral research and data science with demographic information and machine learning to deliver personalized messaging via a multi-channel platform. The health action platform uses the information it has about each member to choose what combination of SMS, email, snail mail, and voice outreach will best engage and motivate each member to take specific actions to improve their health.

When their research showed that the Medicare demographic responded more positively to phone calls than text messaging, Icario used Twilio’s Programmable Voice to develop a robust interactive voice response (IVR) system that could scale quickly. The system provides information based on the type of support members indicate will be most useful in each scenario, from appointment reminders to ongoing outpatient support. Contact patterns are automated: The platform learns through experience which contact channel is most likely to be effective for each member.

Reimagining the waiting room

Philips Patient Management is a patient communication system that powers pre-appointment patient instruction and a virtual waiting-room experience using SMS. When healthcare systems needed to figure out how to bring people back into physical medical visits after the initial contact restrictions of COVID-19 loosened, they looked for a seamless, digital solution. 

The Philips team created a system that enables patients to receive important instructions in the hours and days before their procedure or appointment, and then skip the waiting room upon arrival. Without downloading any app or logging into any site, they can communicate in real time that they’ve arrived and then be ushered in directly when it’s their turn—no waiting room required. The Philips Patient Management System already used Twilio Programmable Messaging to provide pre-appointment guidance to patients by SMS, so adding the virtual waiting room was a natural extension. To activate it quickly, the team used Twilio Studio to design highly customizable UI and UX flows intuitively. In addition to the priceless safety of not having patients sharing space while a highly contagious virus circulates, the system saves an average of 11 minutes per patient in waiting time.

 

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