We took 700M+ data points from top healthcare orgs to create this patient experience guide Download now
We took 700M+ data points from top healthcare orgs to create this patient experience guide Download now
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Utilizing an enterprise EHR system is like traveling on a cruise ship. You and hundreds of fellow passengers are on the same journey, for better or worse. The ship is designed to keep everyone onboard happy. You know which destinations lie ahead, but the schedule may be impacted due to weather.

 But what if you want to stay a little longer in one port? What if you need to hurry up and meet friends at a different destination? What if you’re a little seasick and want to slow down? You’re out of luck. There’s no diverting the cruise ship from its set route, even when passengers aren’t on board.

We often observe this in healthcare. Many complex organizations benefit from the immense scope and scale of an enterprise EHR to care for a broad patient population, but one size does not fit all. Patient experience and engagement varies widely. Healthcare is a competitive market. In many regions, patients have a choice about where to seek care. Without IT tools in place to smooth the patient journey, this looks like:

Patients’ unique needs would benefit from speedboat flexibility to react to market conditions as they change. Enter patient engagement platforms: a solution that natively integrates with your EHR can implement new outreach strategies and realize results now. 

In competitive marketplaces, this is not a luxury but a necessity. If you don’t have the ability to reach patients now, you risk losing them to a facility that can. How do we know? Because 87% of surveyed healthcare decision-makers agree that ability to compete in a marketplace is a driver for implementing patient engagement solutions (source). Fortunately, you don’t have to lag behind.

Fill the Cracks, Fast

What if your organization could start seeing changes in a matter of weeks?

Most systems are designed to work when everything is going right: when patients are fully engaged with all of their tools. In an enterprise health system, the multitude of available tools can flow through a patient portal for a streamlined patient experience. But data shows that more than half of patients aren’t using patient portals, even after receiving opportunities to register.

A platform approach to patient engagement can integrate into the native EHR and bridge some of the cracks with a medium that everyone uses: SMS text messaging.

Unlike enterprise EHR modules, API-integrated platform solutions can be implemented and launched within 45 days – enabling your organization to not just keep up with the Joneses, but surpass their assets.

Break Free from Boilerplate

Why are 89% of patients between the ages of 17-74 reluctant to use online scheduling options? Reasons include lack of access to internet, lack of awareness that options exist, low computer skills, and resistance to changing habits (source). It can be challenging to change their ways when limited to boilerplate messaging options and a set number of scenarios. To activate these patients and keep them within a healthcare network, organizations must be able to think outside the box – and step outside of boxes, too.

Partnership with a flexible patient success platform keeps patients on that journey.  Over 1,000 messaging scenarios, and the ability to develop more, will accommodate your unique organization – and your patients – right from implementation.

Don’t Despair: Automate

When complexity abounds, organizations hesitate to adopt patient engagement technologies because their processes can vary wildly across the system. Specialities following different workflows keeps organizational knowledge siloed and ensures that valuable staff time is required to keep patients in-network. Many are surprised to learn that complexity doesn’t have to be a barrier to modernization. In fact, implementation of a platform is often an opportunity to simplify workflows and identify streamlined ways to automate tired processes. Administrators and staff alike are often pleasantly surprised to learn that people don’t have to manually undertake every step of the scheduling and intake processes.

The perfect mix

Automation is a hot topic right now, but it’s important to deploy a strategy that keeps humans involved when necessary. Sometimes it’s best to simplify the easy stuff and leave the personal touch for when it’s needed most. Main Line Health saved 15,000 minutes of human time per month when they implemented Digital Call Deflection. Inbound calls could be diverted to conversational SMS text messaging, enabling the call center to focus on patient interactions that benefited from a human touch.

What next?

Learn how an out-of-box solution can reach and activate the 40% of patients who aren’t using your organization’s patient portal. Request a demo here.

Patient care extends well beyond the minutes that a clinician and patient pass in an exam room together. The ensuing visit notes are just one piece of the continuum. Healthcare systems have long integrated selections from a smorgasbord of technology tools to document care, optimize practice operations, and integrate patients’ financial journeys…with varying degrees of interoperability and success. 

Moving into 2024, healthcare providers report momentum towards consolidating tech stacks, looking to existing solutions for add-on capabilities before evaluating new vendors. Many EHR vendors are expanding beyond their core functionality of care documentation with solutions across the patient care journey. But organizations should tread with care.

Enterprise EHR is not one-size-fits-all

Every organization has unique aspects that influence operation. The gap between patient expectations and system capabilities can be massive, presenting many opportunities for patients to fall into the chasm between.

What’s holding patients back? Research indicates that barriers to self-service include access to the internet, lack of awareness of services, low computer skills, and change in the habit of making appointments over the phone or face-to-face. But even for patients who engage with technology, a challenging process is likely to disenchant and deter. Patients expect a frictionless experience. Anything less will stand between them and a completed appointment. No pressure, right?

The good news is, in a competitive marketplace, healthcare systems have a huge opportunity to deliver a seamless experience to keep patients coming back.

Most systems are designed to work when everything is going right: when patients are fully engaged with all of their tools. But data shows that only about 20-30% of patients make it through a manual scheduling process to a completed appointment. In their wake, they leave the debris of administrative burden, network leakage, missed appointments, and ultimately: lost revenue.

To capture maximum value from an enterprise EHR, you will need supplemental capabilities and patient engagement guardrails designed to keep the other 70 – 80% of patients in network.

10 Ways that Patient Engagement Platforms Support Patient Retention

  1. End-to-end SMS capabilities: Patient portals can be limiting – many features hide behind walls of clicks and require a patient’s full, unsustained attention. Text message outreach can go beyond directing patients to their portal. Reach more patients by enabling them to make an appointment or complete pre-visit paperwork by way of text messages, start-to-finish.
  2. Smart Waitlist Management: Automate the patient-cancel-staff-scramble with a graceful pivot to an integrated process, filling newly-emptied appointment slots as they arise via automated text outreach.
  3. Streamlined Appointment Management: Enable patients to schedule, reschedule, or cancel appointments through the platform, reducing no-shows and optimizing scheduling efficiency.
  4. Automated Appointment Reminders from a Recognized Phone Number: Text blasts are often ignored or filtered as spam. When patients receive reminders via a trusted organization’s phone number, practices realize improved appointment attendance rates and reduce administrative burdens.
  5. Secure Communication Channels: Stay HIPAA-compliant. Secure communication between patients and healthcare providers can be integrated within the platform.
  6. Health Risk Assessments: Administer and analyze health risk assessments through the platform, aiding in early identification of potential health risks and preventive interventions.
  7. Feedback and Satisfaction Surveys: Collect patient feedback and satisfaction surveys through the platform to gauge the quality of care and identify areas for improvement. Automate post-visit follow-ups and surveys to gather insights into patient experiences and monitor recovery progress.
  8. Pre-Visit Questionnaires: Collect relevant patient information before visits through digital questionnaires, optimizing visit efficiency and information accuracy.
  9. Remote Check-Ins: The digital front door is in patients’ fingertips. Conduct virtual check-ins through the platform, allowing healthcare providers to focus on what’s important and keep schedules on pace  patient well-being between scheduled appointments.
  10. Billing and Payment Integration: Streamline billing processes by integrating payment functionalities within the platform, enhancing the financial aspects of healthcare service delivery.

Simple, right?

Having all of these in place is great, but if they don’t integrate deeply with your EHR, your organization won’t reap maximum returns. Overworked staff can’t spend time tracking these things down manually. For true Patient Success, these workflows must be deeply embedded in a native EHR, automating processes with closed-loop referrals and EHR writebacks.

Navigating the happy path in the complex landscape of enterprise EHRs requires a thoughtful approach to patient engagement. By addressing gaps with personalized strategies, proactive waitlist management, and consideration of generational nuances, healthcare providers can guide patients seamlessly through their journey, leading to improved outcomes and increased value from their EHR investments.

RESOURCE: Learn more about how Luma integrates with EHRs like Epic to support patient retention.

With hours of manual outbound calls on their plates and phones ringing off the hook, many organizations using MEDITECH are looking for ways to stretch their limited staff farther to create the best-in-region experience that will continue to differentiate their brand. 

Imagine if your own organization had hours more time for each staff member to provide a truly concierge-level experience to your patients – ensuring they were up to date on preventive care appointments, checking in after procedures, providing resources to patients who needed financial, language, or other support, and much more. 

These Luma customers have integrated automated and self-service actions using Luma directly into their MEDITECH systems to take manual work off of their staff’s plates and enable a better experience for both patients and staff.

Northfield Hospital + Clinics

At Northfield Hospital + Clinics, “we’re like David between two Goliaths,” said Vern Lougheed, Director of IT. Northfield is located in rural Minnesota, and competes for patients who also have the option to visit large health systems in the Twin Cities like Mayo Clinic. 

Northfield chose Luma to power its patient experience initiatives by integrating directly with MEDITECH via APIs. The resulting efficiency helps Northfield stand out: “Our goal is to provide easy access to our organization anywhere a patient wants it,” said Debbie Oathoudt, IT Program Manager.
Before Luma, Northfield staff manually called each patient for appointment reminders, totaling 150-200 daily calls per FTE. Now, with reminders that are automatically sent to patients with appointments scheduled in MEDITECH, Northfield saves 80 hours in reminder calls every month. The reminders have also helped decrease no-shows by 15%.

Watch the Northfield Hospital + Clinics story

Phelps Memorial Health Center

For Phelps Memorial Health Center, where many patients travel long distances to get to care, better staff efficiency and more patient convenience have a direct impact on patient outcomes. 

API integration with MEDITECH helps Phelps Memorial patients prepare for visits ahead of time by:

Self-service and digital options have been “so well received at Phelps Memorial” by both patients and staff, says Director of EHR Kurt Schmidt. 84% of patients who receive intake forms from Luma complete them ahead of their appointment, and “different departments come to me and ask how they can implement Luma into their workflows,” Kurt said. Phelps Memorial reaches more than 98% of their patient population using Luma. 

Get Outcomes Like These

Northfield Hospital + Clinics and Phelps Memorial Health Center show the power of giving scheduled patients actionable next steps. Not only does this help patients remember and prepare for their appointments, but allowing patients to self-service takes hours of work off of your staff. What’s more, data from KLAS Research shows that patients want self-service options and will even select a provider based on available digital offerings. 

If you’re interested in the possibilities of integrating options like these with MEDITECH, book a quick call with a Luma + MEDITECH expert.:

We’re thrilled to announce that Luma is now fully integrated into one of the healthcare industry’s top electronic health record providers to deliver powerful new capabilities to the thousands of healthcare providers that use the MEDITECH Expanse EHR. This integration will provide new and powerful features for the thousands of healthcare providers that use the Expanse platform.

As an initial member of the MEDITECH Alliance program, and currently the only patient-facing solution included in the program, Luma collaborated with MEDITECH to validate integration of its Patient Success Platform™ and MEDITECH-enabled workflows for integration with MEDITECH Expanse, including patient scheduling, conversational messages, operational and clinical forms, staff scheduling, and more.

Today’s announcement exemplifies how both healthcare providers and patients benefit when a major health system’s EHR provider opens API technologies. This is especially true when the health system goes the extra mile by providing a mechanism for third-party developers, such as Luma, to validate and perfect their own innovative solutions within a real MEDITECH EHR installation.

Five years in the making

Back in 2018, MEDITECH launched MEDITECH Greenfield, an application development environment to fuel the building and adoption of third-party applications. We paid particular attention to this announcement because it emphasized interoperability and offered support for useful technical connections like RESTful APIs, including FHIR. Better still, the program is backed by the MEDITECH technical teams to help developers (and, by extension, MEDITECH customers) maximize the value of the Expanse EHR.

When MEDITECH invited Luma to join the initial roster of third-party developers for the MEDITECH Alliance program, we jumped at the opportunity. MEDITECH Alliance provides greater transparency for organizations interacting with MEDITECH, and simplifies the discovery and purchasing process for customers who want to broaden the capabilities of their current systems. Over several months, we collaborated closely with MEDITECH’s technical and commercial teams to tightly integrate Luma with Expanse, ensuring a friction-free experience for our mutual customers. 

Beta testing in a live customer environment

After thoroughly validating Luma’s functionality within Expanse, MEDITECH invited a healthcare provider, Phelps Memorial Health Center of Holdrege, Nebraska, to pilot Luma within the MEDITECH Greenfield Workspace program. Phelps Memorial Health Center partnered with MEDITECH and Luma Health to leverage MEDITECH’s implementation of the Argonaut FHIR scheduling APIs, creating powerful workflows for staff to more successfully connect with patients. 

This FHIR API-based approach to integration is benefitting patients by allowing them to intuitively schedule and manage their own appointments using apps developed within MEDITECH’s Greenfield Workspace environment. The result of this collaboration and integration is a “single pane of glass” into the patient experience and Luma-enabled touchpoints—all fully integrated into the MEDITECH Expanse experience.

“We are an organization committed to providing a quality patient experience. Collaborating with MEDITECH and Luma Health has empowered us to be adaptable in serving our community’s needs,” said Kurt Schmidt, Phelps Memorial’s director of electronic health records. “Using APIs has resulted in more efficient workflows and a better digital experience for patients who want immediate access to their care.”

Benefits for providers and patients alike

Phelps Memorial has experienced efficiency gains and improved patient experience by working directly with MEDITECH and Luma Health.  For example, 81% of patients now complete digital intake instead of in-office paper forms. 

Phelps Memorial is just one of the many healthcare systems now taking advantage of this deep integration, which uses MEDITECH Expanse APIs to connect appointment, demographic, and schedule data directly with Luma. Then, Luma sends rules-based text, email, and voice reminders to patients based on Luma Bedrock™ data-driven best practices.

When an appointment is confirmed through a Luma communication, the information is instantly sent back into MEDITECH, changing the appointment status to confirmed or canceled. This gives MEDITECH customers an up-to-the-second view of their day. Patients can also schedule their own appointments through Luma, and these appointments are immediately synced to MEDITECH’s scheduling module via MEDITECH Expanse APIs.

[RESOURCE] How Luma integrates with MEDITECH

Want to learn more? Book a quick call with a Luma + MEDITECH expert.