Harmonizing dead-ends in patient engagement

Easy ways to make your Q4 care gap push cheaper, better and faster.

As we enter the last quarter of the year, many healthcare operators across the country are thinking every day about how their organizations are going to reach their care quality targets.

When time is short, a very common approach is to combine bulk texting reminders with telephone outreach from existing staff. These methods can work but have major limitations. Below, we highlight two challenges with the text+phone operation and share simple ways to make it easier for your existing team to achieve more of your Q4 goals without breaking the bank.

Patients don’t read texts right away.

In one of our early pilots, we flagged a patient trying to call the clinic at 5:06pm, minutes after the front desk closed. Argh!

This is a very common situation. Our data show that even if you send a text at 10am, more than 25% of patients won’t read your thoughtful text until after your office is closed. Others will engage when your front desk is at lunch. This is effectively a dead-end for your patient’s engagement journey, especially if there’s no online scheduling option or if they prefer speaking to a human. 

One way you can start to recapture these missed opportunities is by automatically reacting to after-hours engagement. When a patient engages with a message and your front desk is closed, we can automatically help you close the loop up in two ways:

• Send that patient a follow-up text the next time your phone lines are open, encouraging them to complete the engagement.
• Send your care coordinators a short daily chaselist of patients who tried to engage after hours. 

Of course, this doesn’t magically eliminate all challenges with phone outreach, but it can help your team identify and prioritize the patients who can help you reach your percentile goals.

Phone tag can be avoided

One reason that patients might try calling at lunch and after hours could have to do with limited availability. But also, with spam calls being so prevalent, many patients keep their phones on silent all the time… unless they’re expecting an important call. 

There’s a super easy way to make cold outbound phone calls from your staff way more effective, through the simple method of scheduled outbound.

• Instead of starting with a phone call, you can run a “scheduled outbound” campaign. The idea is really straightforward: let your patients know with a text that you plan to reach out to them, and ask for their preferred callback time. 
• Even if patients don’t indicate a callback time, they’re now primed to expect a call.

Our platform automates this process and provides an accessible way for patients of all backgrounds to indicate their callback preferences. We collate the data into smart chaselists of patients who indicated preferred callback times for your phone operators to prioritize. 

The path to improving your quality scores

At Threshold Health, we fundamentally believe that there’s no such thing as a silver bullet when it comes to patient engagement and care gap closure. There’s not a secret optimal way to phrase your message that leverages behavioral science nudge theory to magically drive your patients to your clinic. 

However, we do think there is a ton of room for improvement, although the path for improvement is going to be different for different clinics and patient populations, and the optimal approach will change over time.

That’s why we’re making it easy for healthcare operators to learn and iterate on their campaigns as quickly as possible. You should know within two days of a new campaign launching how well it’s going, whether you can double down or apply a different approach.

We built the Threshold Health platform with these ideas top-of-mind – that’s why we can see and react when your patients open a message, and that’s how we can help you harmonize your digital and human outreach efforts to yield results greater than the sum of their parts. When SMS and telephony aren’t enough, we’ll be here to help you escalate and coordinate your approach, be it through digital gift cards, at-home testing, or your existing care delivery partnerships.

Our low-cost platform can be deployed within days – reach out today to level up your team and hit your most ambitious goals this year!