How Messenger Helps Practices Truly Connect With Patients

Resources are great, but outreach is the key

In healthcare, making connections is everything. A practice can have the best doctors in the world, the most effective therapies, and all the latest medications science can offer — but without reliable methods to contact their patients, all those great resources aren’t likely to yield the best results.

Effective Patient Engagement solutions, on the other hand, can act as a force multiplier at any practice. By reducing time-consuming, repetitive, and labor-intensive tasks, solutions such as Messenger free staff to focus on what matters most — direct patient care.

At the core of Patient Relationship Management

Messenger is a core piece of healow’s overall solutions for better Patient Relationship Management. Simple to activate and use, Messenger features dozens of templated campaigns that address the most common functions any practice handles, including appointment reminders, flu season campaigns, and educational outreach.

Messenger enables practices to use automated reminders in place of the laborious, time-consuming process of making phone calls or sending reminders via other modalities. It can save front-office staff hours of time, reduce the risks of burnout, and help lower no-show rates by keeping patients engaged in their own health. Practices can even send reminders via secure text messages, letting patients confirm appointments or access medical records and lab with a single click on their smartphone.

In addition to the prebuilt campaigns, Messenger lets practices create their own campaigns. For example, they might want to contact all patients who meet specific age criteria, are at risk for a given condition, or who are overdue for routine screenings.

Watch this video to see how healow’s messaging solution has helped bring order and efficiency to a chaotic prescription notifications process, helped families keep their well child appointments, and enabled a practice to effectively reach patients dealing with springtime allergies.

Studies confirm value of automatic, electronic outreach

A study published in Elsevier’s June 2016 edition of Patient Education and Counseling sifted thousands of studies of information technologies that support patients’ self-management. A team of researchers identified 51 studies that were truly automated, fully electronic, and featured either alerts or reminders that had a direct relationship to patients’ health.

The analysis concluded that in 78% of cases, automated reminders had a positive impact and that campaigns that used text messages were the most effective.

“Automated technology may reliably assist patients to adhere to their health regimen, increase attendance rates, supplement discharge instructions, decrease readmission rates, and potentially reduce clinic costs,” the authors concluded.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Messenger is the range of its capabilities. Most practices will use it for reminders and routine outreach, but it can also be used for something as simple as an annual birthday greeting to something as complex — and potentially lifesaving — as targeting patients who have missed cancer screenings and may be at elevated risk.

You can learn more about Messenger by clicking here. Ready for a demo? Email sales@healow.com.