(Edited 07/12/2022 to update use case/success story data)
5-Star service & quality patient experiences shouldn’t be a luxury and patients expect the same, high quality experiences from their medical providers as they do from their favorite online shopping websites, restaurants, retail establishments and recreational outlets. A quality experience might be defined slightly differently from patient to patient, but almost everyone can agree that efficient communication, pleasant staff, convenience, productive interactions (both in-person and virtual), and of course, successful remedies and treatments are the foundation of a 5-star worthy experience. Patients expect their healthcare providers to be attentive and efficient and now more than ever, expectations are sky high when it comes to proactive patient engagement in healthcare. In a post-pandemic, remote/virtual/hybrid everything environment, people expect every vendor, including doctors and dentists to utilize modern technology to make THEIR lives easier; from automated appointment scheduling & reminders, to notifications and updates about prescriptions, refills, office hours/modified holiday schedules, new services & new practitioners… the modern consumer mindset has permeated the patient engagement landscape and is now synonymous with the modern patient mindset.
According to Deloitte’s U.S. Health Care Consumers survey, patients are increasingly open to new care channels and 75% of consumers seek a partnership with their providers, not a one-off interaction! 1 in 3 consumers want to encourage their provider to be more active in investigating and questioning their prescribed treatments. Due to this customer demand, we have seen major shifts over the past five years towards patient-centric services, fierce competition, and increased service expectations. Understanding consumer attitudes and preferences throughout the patient journey is key to supporting healthy behaviors, achieving better health outcomes, and enhancing patient experience
The healthcare industry recognizes the value of continuous engagement throughout the patient lifecycle and has started investing heavily in developing patient engagement strategies to meet patient expectations.
[highlightBox]
Eye-opening Patient Engagement Facts
- 65% of consumers have cut ties with a brand over a single poor customer service experience.
- Accenture found that 61 percent of respondents surveyed would switch health care providers for the ability to get an appointment quickly when needed.
- 30% of missed medical appointments cost the healthcare industry an estimated $150 billion annually
- Research by Prophet found that 81 percent of consumers are unsatisfied with their health care experience, and the less they interact with the system, the happier they are.
- 72% of consumers say their engagement experience with both providers and health plans hasn’t improved—or has worsened—over the last two years.
[/highlightBox]
Major Challenges
Cultural shift – Moving from traditional healthcare habits to the new technology-driven system is often an obstacle to patient engagement. Healthcare naturally catches up, like other customer-centred industries, to put the customer first and but, is there enough tools for hospitals and doctors to align with the current cultural shift?
Trust vs. frustration – Consumers tend to have a difficult time in getting a simple explanation about the status of their bill, what they owe, and to whom they owe it. This generates a low level of trust, primarily due to the inefficiency. Besides, there is a fair amount of ambiguity regarding patient engagement and how to implement it in order to achieve the desired results.
Reliance on instinct rather than data – 30% of the world’s stored data is generated in the health care industry. A single patient typically generates close to 80 megabytes each year. This trove of data has obvious clinical, financial, and operational value, but unfortunately most organizations don’t harness the power of data to drive actionable insights and create personalized healthcare or targeted messaging, for instance!
Lack of digital capabilities – Just as a proper diagnosis requires the right medical device, so does providing a good customer experience. Only 30 percent of health care organizations, participated in a survey, have instituted tools or practices in customer experience. Although 58 percent of health care leaders said offering digital tools and information to enable consumer engagement were high priorities, only 14 percent have those capabilities in place.
The need of the hour is a unified platform that nurtures continuous engagement throughout the lifecycle of patient. Here is where Acqueon comes in.
How Acqueon Transforms and Improves the Entire Patient Engagement Lifecycle
Acqueon’s AI-powered Conversational Engagement Platform provides healthcare organizations with an Advanced Outbound Campaign Manager and App-Orchard Certified Epic EHR Connector Integration that’s proven to improve the quality of patient engagement and ultimately, patient care. The Campaign Manager sits atop Acqueon’s Data Intelligence Platform which ingests data from any CRM, EHR or System of record and enables the personalized, hyper-targeted and ROI-focused outbound campaigns throughout the lifetime of the patient-provider relationship. The platform caters to all requirements across the patient care lifecycle, beginning with initial scheduling and pre-registration processes and appointment confirmations to payments, collections, account services, notifications and on-going relationship management. We provide an incredible boost to provide a proactive, personalized engagement across all channels, increase patient retention, agent productivity, and efficiency in optimizing customer support, data privacy and compliance.
- Automated appointments that are directed to specified doctors based on availability, expertise or location
- Personalized messaging for appointment confirmations, rescheduling, cancellation, drug administration and instructions, drug refills etc.
- Frictionless pre-registration hospital processes, claim filling, status updates, payment reminders and authorization with minimum agent intervention
- Multimodal campaigns with email/SMS trigger and auto scheduling for preemptive care communication and wellness updates
- Call-back management to avoid long queues that significantly reduce patient frustration
- Increased contact rates by orchestrating and executing highly targeted and personalized outbound communications campaigns
- 360-degree view of each member by aggregating and analyzing contact center and enterprise data
- Ability to understand time-of-day and communication channel preferences of the members and improve the contact rates.
- Ability to automatically routing incoming calls to the agent(s) most suited to handle the member’s needs.
- Personalized outreaches based on preferred channel and time/day of every contact.
- Increased contact rates by orchestrating and executing highly targeted and personalized outbound communications campaigns
- Integrated contact monitoring and digital voice/screen recording and real-time analytics
- Regulatory Compliance for DNC and consumer privacy and protection legislation; in-built data privacy and compliance tools.
[highlightBox]
Our vision is bold
Acqueon is fueling growth through powerful, trusted conversations for patient and customer-obsessed organizations. By helping medical providers, health systems and payors easily and quickly implement (or improve) their patient engagement strategy, Acqueon is transforming the future of patient engagement. Patients want proactive outreach and they want it on their terms. Acqueon’s patient-engagement capabilities enable patient journeys that create that “natural, conversational feeling” during every interaction. The result is happier, healthier patients and higher revenue streams for the organization.
[/highlightBox]
Out of the Box Patient Engagement Capabilities Providers Need for 5 Star Patient Engagement
Offer the right experience – anytime, anywhere
With Acqueon’s built-in AI model, agents get to deliver the right message at the right time to the right customers. When the dialer connects the agents with a member, the agents will have contextual understanding of the patient’s full journey right at their fingertips. Armed with next-best-action intelligence, the agents become more engaging and conversational with the patients in order to maximize the potential of every conversation, improving the conversion and retention rates.
Take the lead on every agent-patient interaction
Integrated with the customer database and CRM, Acqueon enable you to facilitate inbound and outbound patient interaction proactively. It can pinpoint patients with serious health risks and assign them to targeted campaigns. The agents can then contact patients at their preferred day/time and using their preferred channel (voice, text, email, etc.). Furthermore, with intelligent call routing based on specific patient requirements, incoming calls can be routed directly to the agent/medical professional best suited to support the patient. The agents can also capture queries and any other customer-facing information through multiple channels while tracking response rates and automatically updating the records. Acqueon’s automatic call-backs capability avoids long queues significantly reducing patient frustration.
Better medication management
With Acqueon, everything is automated. Our conversational engagement platform will automatically remind patients to take medications, refill medications and can even accept patient authorization electronically and then trigger processing and fulfillment. Automated reporting also helps medical staff closely track medication dispensing, authorization, etc. Acqueon helps facilitate and process referrals, bloodwork authorizations and more. Acqueon generates automated appointments specific to doctors based on availability, expertise or location. If one cancels an appointment, the slot is refilled with new patients. Acqueon proactively sends instant, personalized messages for appointment confirmations, rescheduling, cancellation, drug administration, refilling, claim updates, payment reminders etc.
Seamless billing and payment management
Patient billing can be overwhelming for healthcare organizations and require multiple individuals to successfully manage the accounts receivable function. Acqueon helps automate, facilitate and manage this rigorous function. Features such as payment reminders, self-service payment functionality, overdue balance notifications and Next-Best-Action recommendations help bring consistency, order and expediency to your accounting department.
Harness outbound and self-service capabilities
Acqueon’s outbound messaging and text-to-speech tools guide agents to engage patients whenever and wherever they are needed the most. Whether initiating requests or delivering confirmations, you can also transfer the calls to agents or leave automated messages with call-back options. Acqueon can also proactively send outbound campaigns like pre-emptive care communication, wellness updates and lifestyle tips to patients with specific conditions such as diabetes. The platform ensures frictionless hospital processes and easy claim filling with minimum agent intervention, besides facilitating health claims, reimbursements, healthcare plan enrolment.
Unify organization-wide communication across sites
No matter the size or type, every healthcare business thrives on operational efficiency. Acqueon helps you to create a unified communication ecosystem for transformational inside-out experiences. Whether inbound or outbound communication, our next-generation solutions ensure smooth interoperability that leads to effortless patient and agent experiences. Our asynchronous and real-time tools allow you to manage multiple sites from a centralized location.
Serve with world-class regulatory compliance
Acqueon ensures an ongoing regulatory compliance to TCPA, Do Not Call List, GDPR and industry guidelines. It helps banks keep track of these restrictions so the dialler and the agents avoid unnecessary infractions. Mobile phone numbers are automatically removed from calling lists when they appear on the Do Not Call List and outbound dialling automatically restricted to approved calling hours.
A View Into Patient Engagement Success Using Acqueon
Many of the top providers and health systems in the United States rely on Acqueon’s Conversational Engagement Platform to implement modern patient engagement strategies. One of Acqueon’s recent success stories in a US-based, non-profit healthcare organization with 13 + hospitals, 120 + healthcare centers with 3,700 employees and an annual revenue of $2,000,000,000. This organization has revolutionized patient management by deploying Acqueon Engagement, Acqueon’s Advanced Campaign Manager with built-in custom desktop, to use with IVRs, 110 Agents & 110 IVR ports. Using our Platform, this Healthcare organization has:
- introduced prescription refill and appointment adherence
- improved patient insights & QoC data through outbound communications and surveys
- initiated preemptive care communications, reducing patient re-admission rates by nearly 25%.
- decreased inbound calls by using outbound reminders and,
- improved agent performance numbers by transitioning nearly 30 percent of inbound inquiries to self-service IVR options
This use case and success story isn’t unique and Acqueon is proud to be the chosen solution for the biggest, most reputable and most admirable providers across the United States (and globally!).