patient communications Archives - Electronic Health Reporter

Tag: patient communications

Jul 30
2019

A Simple Text Message To Save More Than 13 Million Lives

By Abhinav Shashank, CEO and co-founder, Innovaccer.

Fact 1: As per the latest data made available by the Office for Civil Rights for HHS, more than 208,000 privacy-related complaints have been made in the last 16 years.

Fact 2: If a hospital makes a call to a patient to remind them of their upcoming appointment, they might receive a class action complaint about violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

While these two facts may not necessarily be related to one another, we clearly need to take a hard look at the increasing calls to protect patient privacy. But does that mean providers cannot send a text message to their patients? Certainly not!

California’s latest policy for text message technology for Medicaid plans: A case study

The 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which was put in place to safeguard people from automated text or other telephonic messages, limits organizations from reaching out to their patients through text messages. TCPA can also levy financial penalties on organizations if they are found guilty of violating their policies. On the other hand, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, require every “Covered Entity or Business Associate that comes into contact with Protected Health Information (PHI)” to follow the compliance policies, something that is accepted as a rule of thumb in the healthcare world. For any organization looking to reach out to patients remotely, both HIPAA and TCPA policies are extremely important to comprehend and follow.

In today’s context where patient engagement through text messages has emerged as one of the biggest avenues for optimizing care quality, the TCPA is losing its sheen to some extent in the healthcare domain. While no one denies the importance of TCPA, it does cause some roadblocks for organizations looking to enhance patient engagement in remote areas and population segments.

The California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) recently issued a policy to set guidelines regarding how Medicaid plans can safely use the text messaging technology to connect with beneficiaries. This is critical since one out of three people in California are Medicaid beneficiaries.

The latest ruling allows organizations to reach out to their patients through text messaging after submitting an approval form to the concerned regulators clearly mentioning the structure as well as the intent of such reach out campaigns. They also need to create proper avenues for privacy protection and give users a clear opt-out option. However, once such campaigns are approved, the payer can then run such programs without any additional regulatory clearances. Further, such outreach messages must be made available at no cost to Medicaid members.

What can we learn from the example of DHCS?

According to a study, hospitals could reduce their discharge time by 50 percent if conducted by secure text messaging, saving healthcare facilities an average of $557,253 per year.

Secure text messaging is indeed a big deal. Make no mistakes, privacy and security should still remain the top-most priority while enabling such mechanisms, and password protection is something that we should all consider. However, in an age when we are shifting our focus on precision medicine and advanced robotic surgeries, the ability to create a secure system for text reminders should not be a big deal.

The text message service is indeed the most prevalent form of communication for Americans younger than 50, and about 80% of people state it as the preferred way of receiving notifications. The latest DHCS policy will empower payers to connect with their populations like never before, an ability that would allow them to initiative preventive care and scheduling, while ultimately reducing care and cost and improving outcomes. It can be safely assumed that the latest initiative by DHCS is a breakthrough step in this direction.

Organizations need the ability to meet their patients where they want

I remember one of my friends asking me a very simple yet important question, “If I can connect with my colleague based out of London in literally 10 seconds, why does it take my provider so long to tell me that my appointment has been canceled?” I had no answer.

We cannot expect a person whose calendar is booked for the next 10 days to walk into a clinic for a regular check-up and wait idly for a couple of hours due to inefficient scheduling practices. Worse still, imagine a situation where a person takes time out to visit a facility for their Annual Wellness Visit (AWV) only to find out that their appointment has been rescheduled for the next week.

A simple suggestion of taking aspirin as a first-aid measure in a potential case of a heart attack sent through an SMS on your way to the hospital can help a patient significantly reduce the damage. Remote patient outreach is an important prospect for today’s practices, if not a necessity. It’s really that simple — connect with your patients to know them better, to treat them better, and to make them feel better with minimum interventions. While organizations can still sustain under value-driven contracts without such streamlined patient communication mediums, we cannot keep believing that we would cross that bridge when we come to it.

The road ahead

Consumerism in healthcare was never a widely-discussed topic until very recently, however, things are changing and how! Innovating while respecting the mandates in place should be the road ahead, definitely. The government is supporting new-age initiatives, federal healthcare agencies are bringing in new policies, and large payer and provider organizations are exploring ways to maximize patient satisfaction. Examples set by organizations such as DHCS will act as an ice breaker for other agencies and organizations wanting to break free to cater to the unique needs of the 2020s.

Jan 16
2015

Achieving Effective and Targeted Customer Communications: It’s All About Managing the Three “C’s”

Guest post by Doug Cox, chief strategy officer, Elixir Technologies.

The good news is that there is plenty of great content being generated throughout most health organizations to create engaging, effective member and patient customer communications, which we will call “customer communications” to include any recipient. The bad news is that the content is often locked away in siloed systems and workflows, making it very difficult for marketing, customer experience and mobile strategy teams to leverage information in a streamlined, cost-effective way. The result? Marketing promotions and graphics are only available for use in brochures, purchase history data is only accessible for billing, and so on. Content is trapped in the specific system it served originally, limiting its value to the organization.

These challenges can be overcome by implementing the newest concept in healthcare document creation: content lifecycle management (CLM). The goal of CLM is to enable business teams to create and manage correspondence themselves using portals configured for specific document types, such as healthcare plan summaries, coverage change notifications and benefits statements. Implementing a CLM approach can unlock valuable data, avoid dependence on the availability of IT resources, reduce costs, and speed time to market.

Employing a CLM approach requires achieving three important “C’s”: centralization, collaboration and control. Each of these areas plays a critical role in attaining effective communications that speak directly to the customer’s individual needs and desires.

Here’s a look at each of the three C’s:

Centralization

An important step to improving customer communications is centralizing access to content and templates so that they are readily available to business users. Making it possible to reuse content in multiple health plans and versions, for instance, rather than having substantial amounts of duplicate content that is not shared, will improve efficiency and reduce the amount of effort and time needed to update or change data across versions. Changing a plan benefit for example, can be accomplished in one step for hundreds of document versions, rather than having to replace the information in each individual file.

Collaboration

Participation from people outside the primary workflow is often required but can cause bottlenecks. A good collaboration tool sits atop the entire enterprise, integrating people automatically into the workflow on an ‘as needed’ basis. A browser-based system provides the greatest flexibility because it can be accessed by anyone regardless of location.

Dec 18
2013

A Leading Threat to Top-line Revenue: Patient Discharge

Michael Charest

Guest by Michael Charest, vice president healthcare, insurance and financial Services, GMC Software Technology.

Healthcare organizations today are pursuing a wide range of health IT initiatives in the hopes of reducing costs, improving efficiencies and, most importantly, enhancing patient care. While a great deal of attention is being paid to high-profile health IT topics, such as electronic health records (EHRs) and health information exchange (HIE), there are basic aspects of the workflow at healthcare organizations that can also play a key role in driving healthcare efficiencies. One of these is the patient discharge experience.

How well patients are communicated with upon discharge is a leading threat to a healthcare organization’s top-line revenue, as well as an endangerment to the patient experience. With Medicare/Medicaid regulations now making it difficult to collect revenue for a patient’s second visit for the same problem within 30 days, special attention needs to be paid to how well healthcare organizations are preparing the patient when they walk out the hospital door—and at home following their release. Patients need to be able to understand their at-home instructions for post-visit care so they don’t have to return to the healthcare facility for more treatment or instructions, which will negatively impact the hospital’s revenue and the patient experience.

Creating a more effective discharge experience for patients requires providing clear, easy to read discharge instructions. Accomplishing this is not always a simple task given that the instructions typically are compiled from a large set of data feeds, gathered from multiple treating physicians and need to be provided in a language that the patient can understand. Health IT can play a critical role in overcoming these hurdles.

Similarly, healthcare organizations will benefit from considering the archival system in place. It is important to have an archival process that will enable the organization to prove that discharge instructions were complete and comprehensive. This will avoid the potential for losing Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements in the event of an audit. Not having the ability to easily retrieve all relevant records exposes the healthcare organization to avoidable revenue loss.

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