As physicians shift toward value-based care, patients benefit from more frequent preventive services and more coordinated care; however, all those efforts can meet a major hurdle if patients don’t get the medicine they need. Up to 50% of patients aren’t following their prescriptions, leading to poor health outcomes and higher costs of care.
Finding smarter ways to engage patients is a key part of improving outcomes. Two-way texting makes patient outreach easier without adding to staff workflows, allowing more opportunity to build trust between a patient and physician while helping patients achieve their health care goals.
Med First Immediate Care, headquartered in Raleigh, N.C., and Family Health Centers in Asheville, N.C., saw a nearly 50% response rate to two-way texting sent after patients missed a refill or failed to fill a prescription. Aledade’s pharmacy team fielded these conversations, reducing practice care team workloads, while also escalating complex concerns to physicians as needed.
Communication and convenience
For patients with questions about their medications, calling a busy clinic can be frustrating. The two-way texting program offers an opportunity for the patient to get answers without hold times and phone menus.
Med First Immediate Care’s Clinical Quality Supervisor Karina Anjal said her patients appreciate the ability to get an answer on their own time.
“It’s very convenient,” she said. “They might miss a call, be busy at the time or not be able to have a long conversation on the phone to resolve their issue. But a text, something they can respond back to when it’s convenient for them – and receive real-time responses – that’s what they most liked.
“[The Aledade pharmacy team] sifts through the needs of the patient. Sometimes it’s about things we need to do on our end, but a lot of times it’s more about information and counseling,” she said.
“Patients have a lot of questions about why they’re taking certain medicines, they aren’t taking their medicine correctly or they think their prescriptions have been discontinued. Being able to have the pharmacy team on the other side confirm with us and then go back to the patient and say, ‘We spoke with your physician or your care team and this is what we found’ – the patients really like that,” she said.
Director of Ambulatory Pharmacy Services Allie Fay at Family Health Centers, agreed.
“We have people that respond to the text messages and then resolve the issue without me having to intervene. I feel like everybody's short staffed, us included. If there are ways for us to not have to duplicate work, it makes the staff who might have to be managing more work than normal less stressed,” Fay said.
“From the pharmacy perspective, the Aledade team does a great job at trying to triage problems, to solve problems on their own as much as they can, and then loop us in when action items are needed. It's as if the practice has its own staff member doing those tasks for them. It's like an extension of the practice. It's a great resource, especially for smaller, physician-owned practices.”
Build trust with a two-way texting strategy
Spam calls and marketing texts are common these days, and because of that, many patients may be skeptical about picking up the phone. Med First has focused efforts on making sure patients know their care teams are going to be reaching out.
“At first, patients were skeptical to even answer a phone call,” Anjal said. “Remote areas are sometimes more hesitant to participate in third-party programs. We’ve made sure our patients are very aware about Med First’s partnership with Aledade.”
Patients at Family Health Centers also know to expect outreach from their physicians, and the Aledade App shows physicians which messages have been sent to their patients and when, helping to promote coordinated care.
Fay said, “The patient can see that it's something coming on behalf of us and they trust it. When I look into the App, I can see the outreach that has been done. When I call them, I can follow up, ‘Hey, did you see that text message? Were you able to fill that medicine?’”
Transform your care team’s patient engagement strategy with two-way texting. Contact us to learn how you can improve patient satisfaction and health outcomes.