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Using text message patient outreach beyond appointment reminders
Although appointment reminders are the top use case for text message patient outreach, Corewell Health found SMS also helps plug patients into the full digital experience.
Using text messages for patient outreach isn't necessarily a new patient engagement strategy. But for Corewell Health, a new system and approach have yielded renewed success.
"We are a large, integrated health system and we have been doing SMS outreach for things like appointment reminders and have had some good success," Dan Bazuin, Corewell's digital services director, said in an interview.
But faced with workforce confines, plus the integration of multiple health systems to create Corewell Health in 2022, Bazuin and his team knew they'd need to pivot directions.
As a part of Corewell's Epic Systems EHR, the system began using a new SMS patient engagement tool called Hello World. The system was developed by and integrates with Epic.
According to Bazuin, it helped push Corewell the extra mile in patient outreach and engagement.
SMS text message key for patient engagement
Propelled by trends in healthcare consumerism, SMS text message has proven an essential patient engagement technology.
Text messages are a great way to connect with patients, Bazuin said, because they are more direct and targeted than email or phone calls, helping to reach patients and cut through noise.
"It's become the communication standard," he asserted. "I look at my email inbox, and I've got 30,000 unread messages in Gmail. There's just so much noise."
Although research has shown that text messages perform about as well as direct phone calls to patients, healthcare's workforce problems have pushed SMS beyond being "nice to have."
A health system can send text messages much more easily than it can recruit a team of clinicians to do the same job. This leaves staff available to answer more complex patient questions when they arise.
What's more, text messages are instrumental in population health campaigns. It's not realistic to expect a health system to connect directly with each patient to promote a flu shot clinic, for example. But using SMS messaging, the system can spread awareness quickly and efficiently.
That's one of the things Bazuin and his team liked about Epic's Hello World. The health system previously used a custom-built solution. Although the homegrown tool was a point of pride, it did have its limitations.
"It's all been custom developed by our development teams, and so, the challenge was keeping up with volume," according to Bazuin.
That's not to mention that 2022 merger. With more than one health system coming together, it was essential to determine the best technology stack moving forward.
Bazuin said Hello World was attractive because it has hundreds of use cases beyond the scope of anything his team's homegrown tool could host. SMS messaging doesn't have to only focus on appointment reminders. It can also promote population health campaigns or help patients get plugged into the rest of the digital front door, too.
Bazuin said Hello World also offers message copy that resonates more deeply and clearly with patient populations and is available in more languages than Corewell could've hoped to translate on its own.
"I think there's always this pride of ownership where we think we know our patients best," Bazuin said. "That was a real eye-opening point for us where we saw just simple, clean and very understandable language worked. And so, focusing on simplifying that experience and the journey, simplifying the message to be crisp and concise -- that was key."
Patient outreach is more than an appointment reminder
When first implementing the tool, Corewell decided to turn on every type of SMS campaign that was relevant to their offerings and patient populations.
That strategy yielded some pleasantly surprising results, Bazuin said.
On the first day of implementation, Corewell saw more than 15,000 appointments get confirmed. The SMS tool also led to more than 4,700 appointments being rescheduled via text message, something that helps reduce call center volumes.
Sending appointment reminders might be the foremost use case for SMS patient engagement, but Bazuin and his team quickly learned the technology can do more than that.
"Our focus was around appointment and on time arrival, and while we're seeing benefit there as we expected, we've also seen a pretty significant increase in online scheduling because when we send the reminder, you get the chance to cancel or reschedule," Bazuin added. "In the past, that would've been a no-show, which obviously results in inefficiencies from a clinician standpoint, but also impacts the health journey of the patient."
The system also helped Corewell capture more in patient billing, posting $190,000 payments through SMS replies.
Bazuin said this is not necessarily more than Corewell would have collected, but the health system was able to collect those bills sooner.
Overall, Corewell saw a 95% delivery rate on their SMS messages and a 36% response rate.
This success is likely due to SMS's growing ability to adapt to recipient preferences, something the technology hasn't always been able to do, Bazuin suggested. For example, Corewell sends text messages through two short codes, the five- or six-digit phone numbers many businesses have for sending consumer SMS messages.
Using two different short codes lets Corewell categorize the types of messages sent to patients. One short code is for appointment reminders, while the other is for population health campaigns. This way, patients can opt out of the population health campaigns without missing their appointment reminders.
That level of agility is important, as patients face notification overload. By enabling a consumer-centered approach to SMS text messaging, Corewell has been able to drive greater engagement and push patients toward more self-service options.
"Not only are we seeing patient satisfaction improving, but also just efficiency in our end on the operation side," Bazuin concluded.
Sara Heath has reported news related to patient engagement and health equity since 2015.
