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mHealth Watch Blog Series Week 2: Clients and Care Plans

This week, in the continuation of mHealth Watch’s blog series  they explore what happens to patients after diagnosis and instructions are provided by doctors and healthcare professionals. Sadly, 50 percent of patients do not adhere to the care plans recommended by their physicians.

Clients and Care Plans: mPulse Mobile Solution Boosts Rx Refill Rates

Consider the case of a large Integrated Delivery Network (IDN), which was concerned about the low medication refill rates among its Medicare patients with chronic conditions. According to mPulse Mobile’s Outcomes Report, call center outreach to this population only achieved an 8 percent refill rate – and the costs were high. Email and paper reminders did not drive any increases in refill rates.

Soon the IDN firm’s Pharmacy Operations Director engaged mPulse Mobile, a company that provides mobile engagement solutions for healthcare, to help devise a better solution to increase the refill rates and reduce the workload demands on the pharmacy call center staff.

A solution was designed to target Medicare patients with diabetes, hypertension, and/or high cholesterol who were partially or completely non-adherent with their medications (based on data about incomplete Rx Refills). Then came implementation of mPulse Mobile’s Rx Refill solution for Care Management.

“The solution delivered an interactive text workflow that notified patients that one or more refills were overdue,” explained an mPulse care management expert. “Patients were then able to complete the refill directly through an interactive text workflow.”

Interestingly, a ‘phone scrub’ determined that a high proportion of devices were feature phones (not smart phones), so the workflow was adjusted to require only simple numeric (1,2,3) patient responses. The solution incorporated a proprietary self-identification functionality to maintain identity-related security.

The results?

While the prior telephone outreach was operationally expensive and spurred a low 8 percent refill rate, the text-driven refill rate was 17.6 percent, with 27 percent of targeted patients engaging in the workflow.

It’s instructive that while younger Medicare beneficiaries were more likely to engage in the program than the rest of the population, the mPulse program proved effective across all age groups. Text communication decreased the back-office processing time for each prescription, helping staffers to double their capacity. Opt out rates from the program? A mere 1.6 percent.

The text-based Rx Refill Solution is one way mPulse Mobile helps healthcare organizations improve care plan adherence for patients with chronic conditions. mPulse Mobile also provides condition specific solutions that improve outcomes and are aligned to quality targets. Diabetes is an area of significant focus, with tailored mobile messaging improving adherence for HbA1c testing, LDL-C screening and retinal eye exams. Completion rates for these check-ups all form part of Diabetes Care HEDIS scores. Learn more about our mobile engagement solutions at mpulsemobile.com/solutions

Next Monday, mHealthWatch will present the third blog in this series.

mHealthWatch Publishes Blog Series Highlighting mPulse Mobile’s Patient Engagement Outcomes Report

mPulse Mobile recently released a Patient Engagement Outcomes Report that walks through five innovative mPulse Mobile client programs, including execution details and outcomes. mHealthWatch is publishing a new blog series based on the findings of this report over the next five weeks. We will share each post on the mPulse Mobile blog with additional detail and analysis from our team. First up is a case study showcasing the power of a mobile solution to outperform online ads and mail.

mPulse ‘Patient Access’ Mobile Solution Outperforms Online Ads, Mail

It’s a sad fact of the current state of healthcare that more than 50 percent of individuals with ‘moderate mental illness’ do not receive treatment. Correspondingly, a major dilemma has been how to reach and engage healthcare consumers. But that could soon change, thanks to programs like the one designed by mPulse Mobile. As an illustrative case study, for example, a recent success story points the way to better results.

A behavioral health therapy provider, contracted to provide services to Medicaid beneficiaries with anxiety and depression, needed to increase awareness and enrollment to its service. The company tried online advertising and mail outreach, but it was costly and minimally effective.

The provider then reached out to mPulse Mobile to deliver a more effective and efficient mobile engagement strategy to increase enrollees into the therapy program. The target audience involved custom segments within a wider population of 400,000 Medicaid beneficiaries.

The company implemented mPulse Mobile’s Patient Access solution to efficiently reach and engage large segments of the population in a short period.

“Initially, clinical and demographic datasets were used to assess and segment the 400,000-member population,” according mPulse Mobile’s Outcomes Report. “Next, messaging workflows were implemented with segment-specific language and tone. Individuals had to reply in order to get details of the program and receive a text that contained an embedded link to the therapy site.”

Best of all, the link was trackable to allow insights into the source of site traffic.

What happened? Immediately following the initial text outreach, there was a large spike in web traffic to the therapy site compared to the baseline level driven by online advertising and mailers. Almost immediately, the text channel accounted for 66 percent of weekly therapy sign-ups compared to 11 percent from online advertising and 10 percent from mailed flyers. Opt-out rates from the program were low at 5 percent.

In addition to the clear success of the text channel at increasing awareness and utilization of health services, this use case demonstrated the text channel is much more precision-based than other outreach methods. Organizations can be more strategic about how they conduct their outreach. 95% of messages are read within 3 minutes of being received and response rates frequently reach >30%. This means organizations can launch a targeted campaign to specific patient segments and within hours have powerful metrics to access the impact of the outreach.

Next Monday, mHealthWatch  will present the second blog in this series: the findings of a case study focused on Rx refill rates.