Hi, I’m Frederick Aguilera. I work with Community Health Centers of the Central Coast. I am a Patient Navigation Center Supervisor.
So I am housed in our state-of-the-art call center, Contact Center, Navigation Center. We chose that a navigation center is more of a universal term to describe our department because we touch all facets of our organization.
How has Artera helped you achieve organizational goals?
So we used a team of five to seven folks, full-time employees, who are picking up the phone and calling our Medicaid lives.
And essentially when I came in and Artera was brought to me, I started looking at how we could create a space within Artera, and essentially reduce the amount of FTEs we were using. So we were actually able to do that by reducing it down to one FTE part time, and reach the same amount of patient volume. In fact, we can reach many more patients now than we ever did, in a much shorter period of time and more effectively. And so then using Artera, we’re able to engage with our patients when it’s convenient for them, so they can text us back.
And this has been particularly beneficial in our new patient recruitment efforts. So, when folks, as a safety net provider, when folks get assigned to community health centers as a new patient, it can take years for them to come through the doors because they simply either just didn’t know they had health insurance or they didn’t feel sick enough to come in and see us. Our big focus is on preventative health care, so we want get them in, we want get them established, and Arterra has been instrumental in helping us do that.
What’s Next for Your Partnership with Artera?
Two really big things kind of stick out to us right now. One is improving the scheduling environment. So there’s been a lot of conversation about that. We’ve been surveying our patients a lot, and one of our lowest survey scores is around the patient experience when it comes to scheduling: ease of scheduling, calling in and waiting a long time just to get through to someone to either cancel or reschedule an existing appointment – so we are going to be heavily leaning into conversation builder and flows to really take us to the next level when it comes to improving the patient experience around scheduling, which is a huge lift for us.
And then the second is, under my second sort of purview in the in the organization, which is outreach and enrollment. I’ve already actively engaged with our informatics director, so we’re pulling all of our uninsured encounters from previous weeks or months and building Artera campaigns to outreach those folks and say, “Hey, we can help you get health insurance. We saw that you were recently seen. Text us back and let us help you.”
Artera is not just an appointment reminder platform, and not just a way for us to recruit for new patients or unseen lives, but also to say, like, “we’re here for you in other ways.”
What Advice Would You Give to Another Federally Qualified Health Center Seeking a Patient Communication Platform?
Have an open mind and open heart because I think that those two pieces are really important.
There can be a lot of stress and resistance I think from folks who are just afraid to change. And I think Artera is so innovative in so many ways that really you just gotta jump in. I think there’s no better way for an organization to take the next step from going good to great. And Artera has been sort of in the conversation of almost every single one of those solutions that we put on the table. It’s like, how can we do this? Well, let’s look at Artera…Can Artera help us with that? And so I think that adding it into solution conversations for us as an organization has been really instrumental in us sort of looking and thinking outside the box.
What’s unique about your partnership with Artera?
I love Artera because it’s easy.
It’s been difficult to get people to buy into how easy it is. I think sometimes when we think things that are brought to us are the easiest thing, they can almost seem too good to be true. And I think what I love about Artera is that every time I use it, every time I bring it as a part of a solution to the table, it’s never let me down and it’s never let our patients down. So I think that there’s a consistency and a reliability and a trust aspect to Artera that just makes it easy for me.
And, also, I just love the Arterian environment. There’s a lot of support happening for us as a customer. And as a federally qualified health center who’s extremely concerned with where our dollars are spent, Artera and the support system for their customers has been absolutely incredible — being able to check-in every month, but also anytime we need anything. It’s been incredibly supportive, especially when we look at other vendors that we work with who don’t necessarily have the same sort of delivery when it comes to standing behind their products and supporting their customers.
