Katie Pittman, Golden Valley Memorial Healthcare
My name is Katie Pittman, and I am the director of scheduling and referral coordination at Golden Valley Memorial Healthcare out of Clinton, Missouri. We’re a rural hospital health care system, who serve a lot of the surrounding communities. Golden Valley was established over 50 years ago. GVMH was established over 50 years ago. I was born at Golden Valley. My mom has been a nurse here my whole life, so I’ve grown up in the organization.
Our culture is very family-like, and we take care of each other just like our own patients.
How did your organization implement and scale Expanse Patient Connect – Powered by Artera?
I was able to gain buy-in and support through our leadership team, and also through letting physicians know that they had a voice, and communicating any changes or upcoming go-live dates as we went through the project. The culture at GVMH is very family-oriented. Our patients are truly our staff members, family members, people in the community. And we’ve been able to come together with the system and really keep that in mind as we built it.
How has Expanse Patient Connect – Powered by Artera helped you achieve your patient communication goals?
We were able to personalize this by truly giving patients a voice in their own healthcare at their fingertips. And I think that’s what’s been our biggest success with Patient Connect.
The reason I love Artera so much is that we’ve been able to tailor specific preferences that patients and physicians have voiced to us, and that has really helped our organization across the board.
What’s next?
When I think of the future, I never want to think of a project that as just being done. I want to think of what’s next, and what’s next is always what’s best for the patient. The projects I’m most interested in for the future are generative AI and the care navigator to help expand on the patient experience. I truly think that the care navigator would really help our health equity team expand and provide patients more diversity amongst our organization.
Nicole Clanton, Beauregard Health System
My name is Nicole Clanton. I’m a registered nurse in Deritter, Louisiana, at Beauregard Health System. And about 4 years ago, I became the Population Health Coordinator, and I monitor our quality work for our 10 satellite clinics, and do a lot of work with our ACO, as well as SDOH and community outreach.
How has Expanse Patient Connected – Powered by Artera helped you achieve your organizational goals?
I am very passionate about closing care gaps, especially on preventative health screenings. Mammograms and colonoscopies were two measures that are historically low for our community. And, in fact, colonoscopy or colon cancer screenings are a national low metric. So it’s something that I think a lot of patient education is required on, and to let them know that there are multiple options, and I was so excited to be asked to be a part of this conversation builder (Flows), to build workflows so we could have a interaction with these patients, providing them education and also trying to close their care gaps.
I’m a brand new user of Artera. Only been on the platform for about 3 months now, and I’m so excited to be at the conference and learning all these new avenues that we can help improve patient care, and to really improve the patient experience as a whole through our health system. So I know that we’re going to be focusing on Medicare annual wellness visits and creating a campaign around that as well as diabetic a 1 c lab result, testing and hypertension. So hypertension metric for Cms is based on a patient with a diagnosis of hypertension and their last blood pressure basically is a high reading over 140 over 90. And it’s a huge problem in our community which is a rural healthcare system in Louisiana.
What benefits have your patients and staff experienced?
The results of the text campaign that we created with partnership through Artera was astronomical, and it was like so easy to create this, and to send out multiple messages to hundreds of patients to try to close these care gaps. So, as I said, we’ve only been working on this as a pilot for a couple of months now, and we have been ordering mammograms, as well as getting the dates received. And so a lot of care gaps can be that the patient had this procedure completed outside of our health system, and so obtaining those dates, getting the records and closing the care gaps has been going wonderful in both mammography and colorectal cancer screenings.
Our mammography we sent out about 450 text messages, and we were able to close a care gap for 18% of those already in this short time period. And so to be able to do that big of an impact with just one text messaging system has been super rewarding and great to watch.
And then the colorectal cancer, it is a little bit slower, and that is to be expected because a lot of people don’t want to have a colon cancer screening, and they don’t understand all the different options that are available out there. So I worked really hard about creating some education in the text messaging system to where they were getting more information than just “Hey, I show you that you’re due for colonoscopy.” So really working with the education aspect and multiple options, we were able to close 13% of our colorectal cancer screenings. And I sent out about 800 text messages.
What has been your team’s reaction to the platform?
Text messaging and learning through Artera has been super easy, and all the language has been easy to follow, and I like the layout, the look of the platform is visually appealing, and it’s easy to communicate with my patients, and I’ve actually become really excited about pushing out a new campaign for a provider. Because I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I get to text with some patients and save some lives today.” And it’s pretty exciting.
This text campaign has been really impactful for our community being able to close gaps in care. And it really is an easy button for closing care gaps on a really impactful high level in a shorter period of time.
