Cut Patient Communication Costs With SMS, Email

Everyone knows the healthcare industry is inundated with inefficient paper processes that inflate administrative and operational costs. However, to date, most of the focus on fixing this problem has been on digitizing the patient record. This initiative will definitely put a huge dent in eliminating paper costs, but it could take years of complicated technology implementations and integrations to see any significant impact. The industry seems to be ignoring the significant paper inefficiencies and costs associated with communicating with patients at both the payer and provider level. Health insurance companies and healthcare systems spend billions of dollars a year mailing paper statements, EOBs (explanation of benefits), welcome kits, and appointment notifications to patients. Unlike other industries, the healthcare market has yet to significantly adopt email, SMS (short message service), and social media platforms as a means to interact with clients.

A major reason for the lack of adoption of such messaging services in healthcare is how unorganized patient contact information is stored within most healthcare payer and provider enterprises. "Unlike financial services, where client information is treated like gold and stored in a centralized fashion, patient contact information in payer and provider environments is scattered to the winds," says Scott Brown, senior VP and GM of Coldspark, an electronic messaging delivery and automation company. "Healthcare organizations are likely to have 1/3 of patient email addresses stored in one system, 2/3 stored in another, and mobile phone numbers stored in yet another repository. This has historically made it difficult for these organizations to take advantage of more advanced messaging vehicles such as email and SMS."

EMAIL, SMS FOR WELCOME KITS, PATIENT STATEMENTS CUTS COSTS
Over the past few years, a select group of technology platforms have begun to emerge that provide organizations with disparate client contact repositories (like healthcare institutions) with a centralized control panel for all their messaging activities. These technologies consolidate all client addresses, email addresses, and home and mobile phone numbers for an enterprise and allows users to control mail, email, SMS, and social media messaging initiatives from a single user interface.

Healthcare organizations that have been able to launch SMS and email messaging initiatives using these technology platforms or through their own internal centralization efforts have seen dramatic cost savings, particularly when applied to patient welcome kit and notification and statement delivery initiatives. For example, Kaiser Permanente recently embarked on an SMS deployment in an effort to reduce the number of missed appointments it experienced. At $150 a pop, missed appointments cost organizations like Kaiser millions of dollars per year. The organization implemented an SMS solution to send patients that opt-in to the program paperless appointment reminders directly to their cell phones. The one-month pilot showed that SMS reduced the number of no-shows at a single clinic by 1,837 — resulting in a cost savings of more than $275,000.

Another regional health insurance company recently deployed an email statement initiative in an attempt to cut paper costs. EOBs and other statements are now sent to patients via email first. If that message fails for any reason (i.e. a user doesn't open the email or the message bounces) a paper message is then sent within 24 hours. Through this initiative the insurance company was able to reduce their print run of paper statements by 20% to 35%, depending on the month. This equated to a cost savings of more than $500,000 a year when you consider the cost of printing, shipping, and labor.

Leveraging SMS and email in your messaging activities should be viewed as a means to supplement paper initiatives — not as a full-blown replacement of paper. "Healthcare payers and providers won't be able to completely eliminate paper in the near term because many people still prefer to receive correspondence in this fashion," says Brown. "Plus, there are certain regulations that mandate use of paper for specific communications. However, supplementing print efforts with SMS and email messaging can significantly reduce the number of paper correspondence a healthcare facility needs to ship, cutting costs dramatically."

WHAT ABOUT COMPLIANCE?
The concept of SMS and email messaging for patient communications may sound great, but perhaps you're concerned about the potential HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) ramifications of distributing information in this fashion. While a valid concern, many of the messaging technology platforms on the market provide full encryption capabilities that are fully HIPAA-compliant, ensuring patient information remains private.

Another, often unaddressed, compliance benefit that many of today's unified messaging platforms provide is a complete audit trail of all of your outbound communications. Using these messaging tools, your organization will have insight into what messages were sent, to which patients, at what time, and in what medium. These tools also provide details on which messages were actually viewed and which were not. All of this information is stored in a long-term archive to aid in discovery requests and prevent potential lawsuits.

With this information in mind, perhaps incentives should be placed on adopting paperless patient messaging technologies in addition to the current EHR (electronic medical record) stimulus. It seems to me that systems that allow healthcare institutions to "go paperless" in these areas can be implemented at a much faster pace, providing the industry with more cost savings in the near term.

Ken Congdon is Editor In Chief of Health IT Outcomes. He can be reached at ken.congdon@jamesonpublishing.com.