The need for efforts to increase preventive health screenings among US adults has never been higher. According to a recent JAMA Health Forum study, wellness visits and preventive health screenings have not returned to pre-pandemic levels, and many individuals have continued to delay care despite now having more access to services.
What’s even more shocking is that three out of five Americans admitted to avoiding an important health screening over the last year – up 20% from 2023, with millennials admitting to this at even higher rates (84%). This trend of declining screenings leads to what we call greater “gaps in care.”
While closing care gaps has always been—and will continue to be—a vital priority for healthcare providers, it is now more important than ever. Unaddressed care gaps can lead to negative health outcomes, resulting in increased utilization, lower patient satisfaction and higher costs for the U.S. healthcare system. When these gaps escalate, surges in patient demand can deplete healthcare resources, exacerbate chronic conditions and place further strain on an already overburdened system.
By identifying and addressing these gaps, healthcare providers can enhance care coordination, deliver timely interventions and ensure patients receive comprehensive, continuous care. With automated patient messaging, including efforts to automate patient appointment reminders, providers can begin to tackle these care gaps and improve patient outcomes.
Automated reminders play a crucial role in the patient journey by reducing missed appointments and facilitating better communication with patients.
Challenges in Healthcare Communication and Patient Engagement
Communication is the foundation of modern healthcare, yet traditional methods often fall short due to inefficiencies and misunderstandings. Many healthcare providers still rely on outdated, manual systems, resulting in errors and delays that compromise the necessity of accurate, timely communication.
Inefficient Patient Communication: Patient communication often involves inefficiencies due to manual processes and time-consuming methods like individual phone calls and emails – both of which are vulnerable to human error.
High Manual Workload: The hefty manual workload associated with patient communication places significant strain on administrative staff, who juggle appointment reminders, follow-up calls and rescheduling – just to name a few. Automatic appointment reminders can significantly reduce this burden by providing scheduling capabilities via multiple communication channels and customization options to meet specific practice needs. Patient outreach can easily slip through the cracks when outreach is entirely manual.
Poor Patient Engagement: Successful healthcare and patient outcomes hinge on effective patient engagement. Traditional communication often misses the mark, leaving patients feeling disconnected from their providers, leading to decreased compliance with treatment plans and a lack of proactive health management.
The Benefits of Automated Patient Messaging and Automated Appointment Reminders
Automated patient messaging, including patient appointment reminders, allows providers to manage population health at scale, reduce staff workload and drive conversions of the visits that matter most.
Streamlined Communication: Automation streamlines the communication process by removing manual tasks and enabling the efficient delivery of crucial information, like appointment reminders and health tips, ensuring patients get the message on time and without errors.
Enhanced Patient Engagement: With automated messaging, personalization is the key to keeping patients engaged. Tailored content sent at the right time helps healthcare providers create a stronger bond with their patients, motivating them to take control of their health journey by performing a desired action.
Improved Patient Outcomes: Accurate, timely communication is essential for better patient outcomes. Automated systems keep patients informed about their appointments and follow-up actions, reducing missed appointments and empowering patients to make informed health decisions. Additionally, providers can re-engage lapsed patients with chronic conditions who are highly encouraged to attend annual wellness visits or preventative screenings.
Improved Patient Experience
Effective patient engagement is crucial for delivering a positive patient experience. By leveraging patient appointment reminder software, healthcare providers can enhance patient satisfaction and improve overall care quality. Timely reminders and confirmations help patients feel more connected to their healthcare journey, leading to increased trust and loyalty. Moreover, automated appointment reminders can be tailored to meet individual patient needs, ensuring a personalized experience that sets the tone for a successful appointment. This personalized approach not only makes patients feel valued but also encourages them to be proactive in managing their health, ultimately leading to better health outcomes and a more satisfying healthcare experience.
Maximizing Appointment Attendance
Maximizing appointment attendance is critical for healthcare providers to minimize revenue loss and optimize resource allocation. By implementing automated appointment reminders, providers can significantly reduce no-shows and last-minute cancellations. Multiple reminders can be sent at strategic intervals, ensuring patients stay on track and arrive prepared for their appointments. This not only improves appointment attendance but also enables healthcare providers to allocate resources more efficiently, ultimately leading to better patient outcomes. With fewer missed appointments, healthcare facilities can maintain a more predictable schedule, reduce wait times, and provide timely care to all patients.
Introducing Artera Pulse Outreach
We’ve heard from our customers – and all providers – about just how challenging it can be to keep up with patient outreach and gaps in care. As a result, we recently created a product that can support you in your efforts: Artera Pulse Outreach.
With this latest product, automated patient messaging has never been easier. Artera Pulse Outreach enables providers to send dynamic, recurring patient outreach from any data source (EMR, Pop. Health, CRM and even payers), making flexible, automated bulk patient messaging incredibly easy with just three simple steps. What’s more, Pulse Outreach will support multiple media types, such as static and custom links, as well as PDF and image support.
This new product is designed to reduce manual outreach, improve patient outcomes and is perfect for various workflows like care gap closure, pre and post-visit communication, medication adherence and more.
Artera Pulse Outreach enables customers to “set and forget” bulk messaging on effectively any topic to any desired patient population. Providers can effortlessly coordinate healthcare communication for multiple patient groups through an intuitive workflow setup, helping to close gaps in care, reduce avoidable cancellations and improve patient outcomes.
Additionally, providers have the opportunity to measure results from outreach to appointment using a comprehensive reporting suite that can track everything from response rate, appointment creation, appointment status and more. These insights can be highly impactful, giving your health system conversion rate data and helping you identify opportunities to optimize results.
Automated Patient Messaging: The Artera Impact
While this new product has just launched, Artera has been helping close gaps for years and is a successful partner for guiding patient actions, encouraging greater patient engagement and driving stronger patient outcomes. Here are a few ways Artera has supported our customers through automated patient messaging:
- Hackensack Meridian Health Mammography Campaign: Saw a 45% response rate, leading to 7K appointments scheduled and $2.7M in incremental revenue
- Lakeside Community Healthcare’s Well-Child Campaign: Achieved a 94% success rate, booking 178 well child appointments.
- One enterprise health system experienced a 75% completion of annual wellness visits.
HIPAA Compliant Patient Engagement
Patient engagement software must prioritize HIPAA compliance to safeguard sensitive patient information. By choosing a HIPAA-compliant patient engagement platform, healthcare providers can ensure the secure exchange of patient data and maintain regulatory compliance. Automated appointment reminders, secure messaging, and online check-in features can be integrated with electronic health records (EHRs) and other healthcare systems, streamlining communication and care coordination while maintaining the highest standards of data security. This integration not only enhances the efficiency of healthcare operations but also builds patient trust by ensuring their personal health information is protected.
Amplifying Team Productivity
Healthcare teams can amplify their productivity by automating routine tasks, such as appointment reminders and confirmations. By leveraging patient appointment reminder software, staff can focus on more critical tasks, such as patient care and engagement. Automated reminders can be customized to meet specific needs, including sending multiple messages with to-do lists and detailed information alongside appointment reminders. This not only saves time but also reduces administrative costs associated with manual reminder management, enabling healthcare teams to allocate resources more efficiently and deliver better patient care. By reducing the burden of repetitive tasks, healthcare providers can enhance their overall operational efficiency and improve the quality of care they offer to patients.
Transform Your Pop Health Efforts and Patient Journey
Now more than ever, automated patient messaging has the potential to transform your health system’s population health efforts. As we noted before, gaps in care can lead to missed preventive services, unmanaged chronic diseases, and overall poorer health outcomes. Identifying and addressing these gaps is critical for improving the quality and effectiveness of healthcare.
Automated patient messaging systems play a vital role in closing these gaps by ensuring timely communication, personalized reminders and more consistent, ongoing patient follow-ups, thus promoting better health management and fostering improved patient outcomes. In addition, by automating these tasks, healthcare facilities can free up valuable resources, allowing staff to focus on tasks that require human expertise.
If you want the ability to “set it and forget it” in terms of sending bulk messages to evolving patient populations, Artera Pulse Outreach may be something to explore. To learn more, please go to https://artera.io/pulse-outreach/ or request a demo today.
