If the current healthcare landscape could be summed up in a question, it might be: do we have enough support staff right now? 

As labor costs and staffing challenges increase across every functional area of care delivery, Luma is committed to delivering holistic success for patients and the healthcare system at large, so that your organization can focus on what it does best: providing high-quality care.

Because over 8 million active users interact with Luma on a daily basis, our goal as a platform is to continually adapt, rising to any challenge our customers face. At the end of the day, we strive for holistic success for not only patients, but the healthcare system at large. Staff engagement, efficiency, and satisfaction are key components of that success. 

With this in mind, we are excited to announce that commencing on October 31st and continuing through the year’s end, we’ll be implementing automatic updates to introduce our customers to the new UI and features. Designed with staff efficiency in mind, these new products energize pre-existing workflows for the Luma power user.

Updated User Experience 

Enjoy a quicker, consistent, and more intuitive way to access our platform. The latest update brings staff a modern User Interface, a simplified navigation designed around key focus areas, and a customizable home page that significantly improves support for patient success. All of the following new products and user functionalities are available only in this new UI, completing the enhanced experience.

Scheduler Assist [early access] 

Easier scheduling workflows, now at your fingertips. Scheduler Assist is designed to make staff members’ jobs easier when actively working with patients. Smart workflows streamline the appointment management process, ultimately reducing call wait times, improving patient and staff satisfaction, and providing a direct financial impact on your organization. 

Interested in learning more? Sign up for our Early Access program. 

Insights Center 

Make the most of staff time and create more successful patient journeys with actionable data. With patient behavior insights, visibility into the “true time” providers spend with patients, and more, it’s easy for any role – no matter how reporting-savvy – to understand your organization’s opportunities to better utilize providers or facilitate improved patient outcomes. 

Workflow Builder and Workflow Gallery

Turnkey solutions to solve customer problems right off the shelf. Users can choose from a library of pre-built workflows from the Gallery to customize or create new workflows in Luma with an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface. 

Message Template Translations 

Translate templates to any supported languages with just one click. With the launch of our new UI, we’ve added the ability to automatically translate messaging templates in Mission Control. Now you can leverage AI to translate any of your messaging templates into one or more of our 33 supported languages with just the click of a button. 

As we close 2023 and look to the healthcare landscape of 2024 and beyond, we want your team to feel more supported, excited, and energized than ever before. We’re here to help guide that journey. 

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%.

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-scheduling their own visits directly into MEDITECH Expanse.
• Responding to reminders that are automatically sent based on their upcoming appointments in the MEDITECH schedule.
• Completing intake forms online that are sent back to MEDITECH Expanse before the visit.

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.:

• Patient self-scheduling
• Actionable reminders that allow patients to cancel and reschedule their appointments and join an automated waitlist 
• Automatic offers to switch to text message for patients waiting on hold 
• Automated requests for patients to confirm appointments, complete forms, and more

The statistics are unavoidable–the United States faces a healthcare talent shortage of up to 124,000 physicians by 2034 according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. According to a recent Definitive Healthcare report, since 2020, one in five healthcare workers have quit their jobs, suggesting “up to 47% of healthcare workers plan to leave their positions by 2025.” 

Recently, the Luma Health team met with Dr. Dan Vicencio, interim Chief Medical Officer and practicing physician at Near North Health, to learn more about how the Chicago-area FQHC system is navigating the current healthcare staffing shortage while maintaining mission-critical care. 

Luma Health: Near North has a mission to provide “culturally competent care.” What does that look like in practice? 

Dr. Dan Vicencio: To provide culturally competent care, we have a diverse staff, because it is important to have our care team and staff represent the community we serve. Second thing is to have information in multiple languages wherever possible. We have well over fifteen languages that we speak in the course of a given day with patients across Chicago – everything from Polish on the West Side, to Spanish, which is all over the city, to West African languages here in the South Side. 

LH: The state of Illinois’ official COVID-19 public health emergency status is officially ending next month, May 2023. What challenges are you facing post-pandemic?

DV: We are looking at getting a lot of our patients back into care. COVID-19 really disconnected us from our patients, and so we’re using many different avenues to get patients back into a system of care that they can trust and access readily. We find that a lot of our patients have been using telephones as their main mode of information. Letters are a thing of the past now.

Luma Health is one of the things that we’ve been using to get them back into care. The ability to reach all our patients on their phones is increasingly more important. 

LH: How have post-pandemic staffing shortages impacted Near North? 

DV: A good number of providers did not return to medicine after COVID because of burnout or not being in a place where they felt comfortable applying their trade as a healer. 

We as a healthcare system must find avenues to provide providers and staff with the time to just do what they do best, which is evaluate, diagnose, and treat patients.

We are trying to create that environment to better support providers and staff.  

LH: Does Luma help create that environment? 

DV: ​​Luma definitely helps address some of the staffing shortages that we’ve experienced. Not only does it help cut down on the amount of calls that go to our call center, but our patients now have access to reschedule and cancel those appointments any time of day. So instead of calling us after hours and getting a call center, they actually can get a text and a link from us to schedule.

In the old days, we would’ve had one person making phone call after phone call to reach patients. Now, Luma can reach out to a whole group of patients and give them the same message. And that consistent messaging is key, especially for attribution lists or gaps in care follow-ups. You don’t have that potential off-script variation in message that you would get with a person making manual calls.

Luma makes it as simple as possible to get our points across. The provider has another avenue to automatically reach the patient with important reminders like, “Hey, you need to come back for your three month checkup,” or “You need to make sure that you get your appropriate preventive care screenings.”

LH: What’s another Luma solution that has helped make life easier for your staff? 

DV: Broadcast! This is Chicago. We get a foot of snow sometimes.  With Luma, we can immediately reach out to staff and patients with weather closure information to keep everyone safe.  

Are you an FQHC interested in learning how Luma’s Patient Success Platform might integrate into your workflows? Schedule a 1:1 with a Luma squad member here.