Abdalla, why did you start here and how did you measure success?
It was Vellaire’s idea initially – it was her vision with this.
So we started with this. We had primary care and specialty care. One of the specialties was a gastroenterology group. And we rolled them out in a small – it was not very big in terms of the quantity – number of clinics, just to kind of gauge, you know, what the water temperature would be with, how would the staff be leveraging the tool? In addition, all tying back to having this as an additional outreach tool for the patient and for the staff. To use to kinda leverage all that, their appointment reminders, patient questions, and referrals.
So we started with that group, and then we measured with we measured success. Obviously, phone volume — Okay. — was one that we kind of tried to focus on. And we didn’t really see a dip there.
However, specifically with the digestive group, they really, really drilled down and started leveraging the outreach for referrals. And they saw improvements in their metrics. Velaire touched on doing all that as well during her just when she was speaking just now with the rheumatology group as well. That was they used the outreach for referrals, and they saw their phone service go up, and they saw the referral conversion also go up.
Which in turn obviously improves patient satisfaction and staff. And helps with revenue.
Pam, your organization also did a pilot. Right? You had twenty practices, a controlled patient access Center was involved and if we showed her there we go, we see her car. And it was mostly for appointment scheduling.
That’s right. Yeah. And so the same question, why did you start there? And how did you measure success at your organization?
So we measured success through no-show rates, everything that everybody talked about in the previous panel. We did the same things, but the one thing that I think that gets often forgotten about, and I think it might be a little PTSD on my part, is, we used the platform for, appointment reminders around COVID vaccinations.
And I will tell you something in New Jersey – those of you from New York and New Jersey, we got hit hard, we got hit fast, and we suffered for a long time. And at Hackensack Meridian Health, we decided during COVID that we were gonna stand up 23 vaccination clinics across the state, and we delivered vaccinations to a million people.
There was no way we were going to be able to handle the inbound phone traffic for a million appointments. There just was no way, so we had to create this online solution, and we needed this texting solution to remind people about these appointments that they were so desperately looking for.
And so that’s that was when our aha moment was very early on. Doing the practices that all made sense, you know, as, you know, as people that work in the digital space, it’s intuitive. It makes sense to us all. But the aha moment was when we could deliver, good information, the right information at the right time, in a really scalable, critical way.
The reason we started in these different areas of our business, so our national contact center, eight seven seven four Hanger, it’s a toll-free line that patients can call. I’ve personally wanted to see if patients would text in. And I manage this team, And, so we started there just to see what kind of traction we’d get. In the patient care centers, we started there because we have You know, I don’t know about y’all, but, our office administrators have a very hard job.
They are the first person that, encounters our patients. Right, when they either walk through the door or they get on the phone, and we’re burning them out with the telephones. And so we wanted to not only give our patients a better experience and ease of access, but we wanted to make their jobs and their lives easier.
And then we also, put it into our other, department of financial counseling. So a lot of times, you know, we would require that our financial counselors would call a patient. And to everybody’s point, nobody answers the phone. It’s an eight five five phone number. Forget about it. I might even try to block it. Right?
But when we gave this tool to them, and they’re able to send a secure message introduce themselves as a human, attach an invoice to it, and say, would you like to have a conversation about your bill? If not, click here to pay. Like, not everybody wanted to have a conversation. So we were able to see, like, okay, we don’t have all our people on the phone counseling our patients, some people just wanna click and pay. And our click rate was just huge and the quantity that we were collecting the average went up, you know, so over the phone, we may collect, you know, two hundred dollars, and patients click to pay, and they may pay four hundred dollars.
So that’s why we started out there, just creating ease everywhere. And then the way we measure success, same, you know, decrease in no-shows, call volume. But we also did a survey with our office administrators.
Again, some of the most important people in our organization said, prior to launching the pilot, said, tell us about, you know, how the phone impacts your joy.
And, we went live in our pilot for ninety days, and we went back to those office administrators and said, tell us how Artera has impacted your life. And I found out last night, one of our office administrators printed out a bunch of “I Love Artera” signs because they were afraid that in the pilot, you know, this was just a testing ground, and we were gonna take it away if we couldn’t prove its value. So he posts all these pictures of I Love Artera. I sent it to Artera reps, and it went viral in Artera.
I heard. Yeah. I’m sure you, Artera people have seen it. That’s Lucas Shaw. Anyway, but we asked them “did this improve your lives and your job?” and overwhelmingly, they said yes.
So that’s how we measured.
