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Jane Pauley Community Health Center (JPCHC) is central Indiana’s trusted non-profit provider for affordable primary, behavioral, and dental health services.
As an OCHIN-affiliated Federally Qualified Health Center, JPCHC provides primary care for under-served populations across four close-knit counties in central Indiana. Their mission is to promote a healthy community through the provision of accessible, respectful and integrated healthcare to any and all individuals, regardless of insurance status.
The community health center provides a vast range of services to their patients – 60% of whom are on Medicaid – including primary, behavioral, dental, pharmacy and even ancillary care, such as free healthcare enrollment support, onsite patient food pantries and a sliding fee scale discount. With such a rich array of high-quality services, they needed a patient communication platform to match it – a realization the health center had during a recent audit of their patient journey and touchpoint workflow.
Despite previously using a one-way appointment reminder system, the health center was looking to enhance its communication with conversational messaging to expand access and reach more patients – many of whom work long hours and have little time to make or receive calls during the day. According to Patrick Wooten, Chief Operating Officer at JPCHC, they “wanted to get a tool that was really robust and propelled us into current times” compared to the old system that “was limited in capabilities.” Wooten underscored it was “critical to find a new system that would enable us to collaborate with a patient beyond just appointment reminders – something that Artera could offer.” The team then “worked to identify systems and efficiencies for how they communicate with patients,” according to Caroline Hoy, Director of Marketing at JPCHC. “This ultimately was about improving our text messaging system.” Based on recommendations through the OCHIN-Epic collaborative, they ultimately landed on Artera, officially going live in October 2022.
While implementing a new technology like Artera can be daunting for organizations of any size, the implementation was relatively seamless for the mid-size FQHC, wrapping up in just over a month. “In terms of onboarding, the Artera system is so turnkey – as is the setup process and the team in place who was supporting us. We were surprised we were able to successfully implement in just four to six weeks. As far as technical changes go, it was seamless thanks to the efficient implementation process the Artera team sets up,” said Hoy.
Despite a successful implementation, the adoption of new technology can be challenging to deploy internally, according to Wooten. This is why – with executive support – JPCHC built a cross-functional partnership across internal teams such as Marketing, IT and Operations, to maximize the use of Artera following implementation. They also work closely with their clinical team to ensure alignment around patient communication expectations, giving them insight into how long it takes for staff to get back to a patient.
As a group, one of the first steps they took was to develop a robust strategy map that outlines their patient communications from a process perspective, equipping their teams with relevant information about the new system. This document, which is constantly updated to reflect best practices, is easily referenceable and has empowered staff “to talk intelligently about when messages are going out, what patients are receiving and generally what the Artera workflow looks like,” said Wooten.
Above all, the strategy map – and internal collaborative structure – has helped staff across the entire organization get up to speed fast. In fact, “After about a week, staff really started to get the platform and started seeing the benefits of it – and so did the patients who are ecstatic that they can now text,” said Katherine Mehl, Registration Trainer at JPCHC.
Beyond just appointment reminders, one of the main appeals of implementing Artera was its diverse set of capabilities such as broadcast messages, campaigns and conversational messaging, all of which allow for more seamless communication between staff and patients.
Broadcast messages in particular have been great for communicating with a large number of patients quickly, especially in a place like Indiana, where the weather frequently changes. This has eliminated staff time for call center agents who previously had to make individual calls to patients if a provider was out sick, or there was a weather-related issue.
For example, when the Canadian wildfires caused unhealthy air quality across the state in June 2023, JPCHC call center staff were “able to quickly send out over 47,000 messages to inform patients of the poor air quality and to watch out for any relevant symptoms,” said Mehl. It took less than one hour to set up the messages in Artera Compare this to calling 47,000 patients, which could take staff over 3,100 hours of phone time.
Another time saver for the staff comes in the form of quick responses to patients, which only require “about three to four clicks for registration staff,” according to Mehl. Additionally, “Conversational messaging is a game changer for our call center and staff – it’s been incredibly helpful in cutting time spent on the phone, reducing unnecessary phone tag and enabling asynchronous communication with patients, making it more efficient for our resources and easier for patients,” according to Hoy.
Another appeal to signing on to a more robust system like Artera was to simplify their marketing call-to-action for implementing their first-ever, market-wide advertising and radio campaigns.
Since their new phone numbers through Artera can call forward and patch into their regular phone numbers, they developed an inbound keyword used in the Artera automation designed to assist their enrollment team in adding new members. They decided on the keyword “care,” which helped them develop a “much easier marketing CTA” with “text ‘care’ or call” – something that has been posted on their site, on billboards, and even on their van.
In just the first few months of implementing the “care” keyword automation, they received over 500 texts of “care.” Additionally, to help the call center staff save time, they were able to automate a first-natural scheduling question. “If the word ‘care’ did come into the system, we were able to automate the first natural question our call center team would ask, which was just one more example of time savings and resource efficiency with Artera,” according to Hoy.
Regarding no-show rates, JPCHC’s goal is to stay below the industry average of 20%. Since implementing Artera, this has decreased by 31% over time: “Naturally just by implementing texting, you’re going to reduce no-shows since you have more opportunity to conversate with patients,” said Wooten.
Based on staff feedback, the team additionally updated their no-show and late policy, enhancing their Artera messages to reflect the new policy to communicate clearly with patients: “It’s been an amazing way to communicate practice-level topics with patients. Not only can we message and improve efficiencies around appointments, but we can communicate about a whole host of topics that impact patients – something that really helps us deliver a great experience,” said Wooten.
Another KPI Wooten and his staff track is provider utilization rate by practice. “We have a goal of 80% slot utilization. Most recently, we looked at which providers were three-quarters booked and three-quarters available – we’ve seen an improvement in utilization rate since the deployment, and we’re using our slots a lot better as there’s more cross-communication between our practice locations and our patients.”
From a patient access perspective, Wooten and his team also analyze the average vs. median days wait by practice across the entire network. They can look at the maximum number of days a patient has to wait (21) vs. the average wait days (4.41). “I’ve seen an improved rate of patient access. As we have a better modality in place, we’re able to free up those spots so that patients that will show up can get into those spots,” Wooten said.
In addition to improving slot utilization and patient access, Artera has helped to dramatically increase MyChart enrollment by as much as 10% as patients get a link via text that takes them to activate their MyChart account, according to Mehl. This then leads them to even more resources for their care.
In the hunt for a new patient communication platform, JPCHC was also interested in greater access to operational data and insights that could optimize its overall engagement strategy. With Artera Analytics Plus, they have done just that, garnering tremendous value from the platform in terms of data and insights.
One example of this was when they identified an opportunity to further support their growing immigrant population by leveraging extended language support, specifically enabling Haitian Creole, which is helping them to address a large portion of their patient base. They can now connect more deeply with these patients, expanding access to care and improving engagement.
They have also identified areas for improvement in terms of message copy, timing, and cadence. For message copy in particular, they’ve added an automated post-appointment follow-up that includes a link to their patient experience survey — something so simple that “tripled the response rate,” said Hoy. As for message timing, the JPCHC team “updated the second touchpoint to patients after collecting feedback and studying response rates” and is now refining their strategy to “eliminate over-communication for those patients who have standing behavioral health weekly appointments,” said Hoy.
“It’s been tremendous. From an executive perspective, the rich pool of data available in Artera enables us to closely monitor patient engagement in the form of response rates to link clicks and more, helping us glean operational insights to improve staff efficiency and the patient experience,” said Wooten.
Above all, the team works with the patient in mind. In fact, they even track the time it takes to get back to the patient, with an expectation they communicate with patients as quickly as possible (within 1 hour or 24 hours maximum). “There is an expectation that we connect back with patients quickly – this is a real person that needs some help and support,” said Wooten.
As the partnership continues to evolve, JPCHC is exploring other education and outreach campaigns, diving into new functionality and optimizing their workflows to improve patient engagement. Questions the team asks on a regular basis include: “How can we change the automation flow? How could we build this out differently to improve the patient experience?”
With the help of Artera’s customer support, the organization is able to make strides toward its goals: “We are so grateful for the ongoing customer service; we come together to brainstorm ideas and talk through best practices – it’s just this constant, evolving partnership and we honestly couldn’t have made the improvements that we have without such a responsive customer support representative at Artera,” said Hoy.
In 2024, JPCHC integrated Feedtrail, a patient experience management platform, with Artera to improve the patient experience. Feedtrail surveys have been deployed – leveraging Artera’s message API – to deliver their post-visit surveys to patients. As a result of the integration, patients receive their surveys from JPCHC’s trusted / recognizable phone number and they can easily track the performance of their survey messages in real-time.
