Hear from Indiana-based Hancock Health’s Director of Information Services Angela Soliday about how her organization is using MEDITECH’s patient engagement solutions, including Patient Connect (mobile communications) and MyHealth (portal), to make their patient interactions more efficient and effective. The conversation touches on the software’s exciting new AI-driven features like Conversation Flows and the Staff AI Co-Pilot, and is led by our host, Rachel Wilkes.
Podcast host Rachel Wilkes is the Director of Corporate Brand and Lead Generation Marketing at MEDITECH. She oversees MEDITECH's corporate communications, branding, events and market research, and serves as executive sponsor of MEDITECH’s generative AI efforts. Over the course of her MEDITECH career, she has also served in various roles in Marketing and strategic Product Management. Rachel is a Certified Product Manager and holds an MBA from Bryant University.
00:00:00:09 - 00:00:02:19UnknownWhen we saw that,
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patient connect was an opportunity that Meditech was offering, we were really excited to,
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kind of partner with them
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try to bring this patient engagement,
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strategy to us.
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we've seen a dramatic decrease and no show.
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Rates were running now as an organization, about a 4% no-show rate, which was
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really good improvement to prior to patient connect.
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Welcome to another episode of the Medi tech podcast, where the leader in health care technology empowering you to be a more informed health care consumer. And provider. Hear the latest from our friends and colleagues on topics we think you should know about. I'm Rachel Wilkes, director at Medi Tech, and today I'll be your host.
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I'm joined today by Angela Solidi, director of information services at Hancock Health, a health system in Indiana about 15 miles east of downtown Indianapolis.
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Hancock has a long partnership with Meditech, dating back to the 1990s, and has been one of the early adopters of Expanse Patient Connect medi techs real time automated communication solution. Patient connect allows health care organizations to reach their patients conveniently and securely with easy to use, bidirectional texting with AI driven functionality that meets patients where they are on the devices they choose and in their preferred language.
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We're excited to have a chance to talk to Angie today about how patient connect is improving. Hancock Health's patient communications.
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Angie, can you tell us a little bit about your organization, how your Patient Connect implementation began and what's happening now in the moment?
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Thank you for,
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inviting me to come and just share a little bit about our experience.
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We are a 69 bed acute care facility.
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We have an attached military surgery center, a cancer center. We have 20 ambulatory practices that include family internal medicine, pediatrics, and,
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several specialties.
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Visit wise, we do about 3000 inpatient discharges annually, about 24,000, er visits.
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We have about 123,000 outpatient lab, imaging rehab,
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type visits, and then
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230,000 annual
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ambulatory practice visits throughout our different
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offices and then our wellness centers.
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We they see about 700,000 annual
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visits.
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When we seen that,
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patient connect was an opportunity that Meditech was offering, we were really excited to,
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kind of partner with them to, to try to bring this patient engagement,
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strategy to us.
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We had previously had kind of a stent with an another vendor,
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looking to do some of these things. And it was just,
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not extremely smooth.
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So we were looking for something more integrated and more,
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well connected with, with the EMR.
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We started out with appointment reminders.
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We've set up 35 practice locations within Patient Connect.
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Initially people were shying away from the two way communication, but we've we've had a few practices that really have taken that and ran with setting, including really our employer strategy uses it pretty heavily.
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We found a lot of really interesting use cases for,
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campaigns. So everything from providers moving
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to ACO annual notifications. We do,
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all of our flu shot clinics through that.
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We've done mammogram outreaches.
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And then we were also using it,
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kind of in a manual campaign perspective for outstanding ambulatory orders to try to again, encourage those patients to get,
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scheduled. So we were we had worked with our report writer to pull some of our,
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outstanding ambulatory orders where the patient hadn't yet scheduled the appointment.
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our team has tried to call and has placed the phone tag game. So we started,
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with a campaign of sending that out and,
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sending them text messages saying, hey,
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we're trying to schedule an appointment. And we thought we had really good success with getting them to actually then call us back and get scheduled.
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So we then have worked with Meditech and our chair to kind of streamline that and make it a more automated process.
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What they're calling the reoccurring,
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campaigns or order reconciliation, where we sftp that report to them daily
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and they're
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sending out those,
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messages. We've had about a 78%,
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closure rate on those when we send out this text messages that patients are turning around calling us back and,
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getting scheduled.
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So
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that's been really exciting.
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We've also implemented the send message API.
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That kind of partners with the patient portal so that when,
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messages workload and that Sarah Portal messages come in to the patient,
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they get text messages letting them know,
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that they have a portal message.
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those are a few of the more recent use cases that we've, we've leveraged,
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It's exciting to hear about everything you're doing with the technology.
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I wanted to just underline what you mentioned. Meditech has been bolstering the integration between my health and patient connect. This includes the ability to send additional classes of SMS messages to alert patients to new activity in their portal. So we're particularly glad to hear you're having success with this more recent piece of integration.
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Can you tell me a little bit more about what you're currently working on?
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The other piece that we're looking to add on is potentially kind of forms completion consent signing and things like that through
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text messaging. We do a lot with questionnaires though, and we send that via text message as well that they have outstanding,
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questionnaires to be completed.
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New patient packets. We're sending through the patient portal,
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as questionnaires and,
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sending out text messages for those.
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That's great. We're really excited to hear about these tangible benefits my health and patient Connect are having on patient engagement for your organization.
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You mentioned that you've seen a 78% closure rate on patients calling back and getting scheduled after receiving automated messages.
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Are there any other areas where you're seeing a noticeable improvement?
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we've seen a dramatic decrease and no show.
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Rates were running now as an organization, about a 4% no-show rate, which was
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really good improvement to prior to patient connect.
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Tell me what steps you're taking to make sure you're accommodating the communication preferences of your patients.
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so we actually can send the message out like all three ways. And that's how we have our campaign set up. So it will try text messaging if they have a text of a line.
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If they don't have a text line, we send a phone call or an email.
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So you can set
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one message to go out. Whichever communication method the patient has enabled for.
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And patients appreciate getting the text message when they have a new message on the portal versus having to
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look for an email telling them that
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there's a new message. So they've appreciated that
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I'm curious, from your experience as an early adopter of patient Connect, what are some things about the deployment process that you'd recommend other organizations consider as they anticipate and prepare to utilize the solution themselves?
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Yeah, just a couple things to think through. A lot of it is really,
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we spent a lot of time initially trying to think about design for the practices and patient connect.
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And that's really to think about if, if you move to that second phase of two way communication really is where it seems really important.
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Like what
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list do you want? How do you want your patients grouped?
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So again, we spent a lot of time thinking through that.
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And I think even still had some kind of, oh, we might have done that a little different.
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As far as how we broke people out or together,
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kind of the, the idea of a being able to merge a message.
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So if you have,
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appointments happening, like for at the main campus. So we put everything that's scheduled at the main campus under one practice so that we could merge all those messages so that if they had a cardiology and a sleep or,
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pulmonary test,
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they will get one message that says, you know, you have
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appointments at the Hancock with,
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your earliest date and time versus getting three text messages and then them showing up at the time of the third one and missing the first two appointments.
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So merging messages is something you can do within a practice. But,
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if they were in two physical locations. So we have a, campus that's across the parking lot. We didn't want them. We wanted them to know that that one is separate and a different location. So we separated those practices and patient connect.
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That's definitely some helpful context about some of what you had to think through in terms of creating cohorts and workflows to have more streamlined, two way communication. I know that Hancock Health has also been using AI tools such as patient connects, conversation flows. Can you tell us how you're using this technology to support your population health objectives?
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there's kind of a new feature to be able to text message from the registries.
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So we are working on,
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registry text messaging. And so we've,
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talked through a few,
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interesting use cases with some of our care managers. So we have patients on a registry if they're part of the COPD
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protocol panel that we have. And so they could then take all the patients that are on that registry, send them out a text message saying,
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reply back what zone you're in, red, green, yellow.
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And then you can send auto,
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return messages based on keywords. So again if they reply back that they're in a green zone, it could say great. We'll check in with you again in a few days and close the message. But if they're in yellow or red,
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it could prompt other actions. So it could land on a work list for you.
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The car could send back a message saying, we need to see you in the office. Please call us to get scheduled.
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you can also use those keywords to do other types of auto responses back. So things like if a patient sends a message like what's my lab results? It could say, please check your portal for your lab results and send them a link to.
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And that's kind of all automated,
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using some of those keyword features.
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Thanks, Angie.
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We're excited to have the chance to highlight how Hancock Health is using Patient Connect and My Health.
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We're also excited to let our listeners know about some of the newest features.
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My health now includes key accessibility features such as keyboard navigation support labels that support assistive technologies like screen readers, and a calendar with readable dates and times for visually impaired users.
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The patient calendar gives patients the flexibility to view their appointments in the format that works best for them, whether by day, week, month, or year.
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Patients can see both past and upcoming visits, with additional details available at a click. They can even download their schedule to sync with any external calendar they use.
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We've also updated My Health with the current stay dashboard to provide patients and their family members with real time access to health and logistical information throughout the patient's day.
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The dashboard includes key details such as procedure status, current medications, care team members, care plan information, room location, and more.
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We've also enhanced patient connect in some exciting ways. We've added the ability to optimize care management workflows by sending patients SMS notifications directly from patient registries within care. Compass.
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The staff AI Copilot helps users increase the efficiency of composing messages to patients by translating messages to and from patients in their preferred language, as well as shortening messages and summarizing historical conversations. Finally, we've added conversation flows, providing guided workflows for patient outreach using multi-step conversation templates and natural language understanding for tasks like no-show workflows, sending satisfaction surveys, and pre and post appointment instructions.
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Thank you again for your time and we're looking forward to hearing more about these updates in your future patient connect and my health successes down the road.
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thank you guys so much for inviting me
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to speak about our journey
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Thanks for listening to our conversation with Angie Solid from Hancock Health. I'm happy to report that in the time since we've chatted with Angie Hancock, health has reported exciting results from the Referral Outreach program. Since launching the program to expand Patient Connect, confirmed responses for recurring appointments have risen from 24% to 84%.
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It's just one more example of how Expanse Patient Connect helps meet patients where they are.
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That's all for today, but please stay informed by subscribing to many tech podcasts, and we'll talk to you next time.