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Month: June 2022

6 Innovations in Streaming Health Content that Improve Member Experience

Posted on by Nicole Lopez

The logic behind streaming health content is simple. Just telling someone that it’s time to get a mammogram or renew a prescription isn’t always enough to get them to do it. There are numerous barriers to consider: social determinates of health (SDOH) factors, health beliefs, the health literacy gap, apathy, and more. Sending a well-timed, well-written text message can sometimes do the job, but often we need to go further and help the health consumer understand why taking an action matters and how they are benefiting from it. Or we simply need to get their attention for long enough to even hear us out.  

Streaming health education, when thoughtfully integrated into engagement solutions, can achieve all of these things. It infuses current and innovative types of content into member outreach in new ways. The same way we have seen the biggest brands integrate streaming content into the consumer experience, healthcare can mirror and change the way they interact with their populations and, more importantly, change the way their populations interact with them.  

6 Innovative Best Practices in Streaming Health Content

 

Innovation 1: Types of Content

The most innovative aspect of content in the last few years just may be the format it’s delivered in. Overall, there are four major content categories we’ve seen work well when brought into healthcare outreach. 

Gifs

A lot can be said with a well-timed gif, and using humor to capture attention, as gifs usually do, are an effective way to focus the member on a very real issue, such as fall safety in our example above. 

Self-Produced Videos

Self-produced videos are often short, recorded in selfie mode, and have less focus on production value. These qualities make them more personal, fun, and more able to capture attention and connect the creator with the audience.  

Licensable Streaming Content

Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, and more! Streaming is the main delivery method for content today and used by a huge amount of the population. With the option of licensable libraries of streaming health education content now on the market, healthcare organizations can enter the game and have a better chance of meeting members where they are and in the ways they already live their lives. 

Stories

Started by Snapchat and copied by Facebook and Instagram, stories are now everywhere. Healthcare can take stories and use social media as another channel to communicate with their populations or repurpose them for SMS delivered solutions. 

Innovation 2: Making the Ask 

Now that you have your content format ready to go, you’ll want clear, robust calls to action embedded within the streaming health experience, which is our second innovative best practice. Think about it this way: all the content delivered quickly falls short if you aren’t ultimately making the ask. 

When crafting your call to action, make sure it is not only closely tied to the content being delivered but it is also specifically based on that recipient’s needs.  

Interested in learning more? Access the guide to get the full version of this content » 

Innovation 3: Integrating Your Content into Your Programs 

When you combine conversational AI capabilities with health content, you can uncover barriers to action through the consumer’s response and in turn deliver bite-sized educational clips to address their specific obstacle. This way, you are not only educating them on why they should take a certain action, but you are delivering tailored content which educates around the specific reason that individual is not complying. And because this is built on conversational AI technology, all of this is done at scale, yet individualized, for your entire population. 

 

Innovation 4: Creating Surround Sound

Most of the daily lives of health consumers is digital– emails, websites, apps, social media, text messaging, phone calls, streaming content, and more. This makes it easy to apply our fourth innovative technique: create surround sound by producing a digital omnichannel experience. 

In action, it might look like this: If we were heading into winter and you were trying to drive flu vaccinations, you might post an interactive FAQ to your organization’s social media story, send the mini lesson video through email or text message, and have the full vaccine lesson available through your website portal. Your audience would likely run into your content multiple times, which serves to reinforce the educational message and makes it more likely they’ll act on it. 

Innovation 5: Targeting Your Content to Clear Business Goals 

Your streaming health content is only as effective as it is in line with your goal. So, when producing and deploying content, you should tie it to the areas of your business you want to see an impact on—Health Outcomes Surveys (HOS), preventive screenings, diabetes prevention, and gaps in care just to name a few. Plainly, if your content isn’t addressing the action you’re trying to drive, you won’t drive that action. 

Innovation 6: Data, Data, Data 

Metrics regularly tracked still apply, such as text messages delivered, response rate, and completion rate of the desired action. Integrating streaming health content into your outreach, though, broadens the data you have access to for outreach performance and reporting. Now we can look at clickthrough rate to videos or activities, total views, engagement time, pages or lessons viewed per person, average number of course enrollments, average view time per piece of content, and so much more.

Integrating Health Content into Your Engagement Programs 

When healthcare organizations take the innovative approach of creating educational health content (videos, bite-sized content, interactive FAQs, polls, quizzes, and more) and incorporate it in their outreach, we see much longer engagement times, the underlying problem of health literacy improve, and the fostering of better relationships between healthcare organizations and health consumers. 

Our hope is this new frontier of educational health content creates a change in the health literacy of our society as a whole and improves the engagement and investment of individuals in their own health and well-being. 

Interested in even deeper insights into this new way of outreach? Download the guide, 6 Innovations in Streaming Health Content that Improves the Member Experience, to get the full version of this content.

How to Address Changes in Patient Engagement and Motivate Flu Vaccination Fulfillment

Posted on by mPulse Team

Flu season is coming back around, and in a post-COVID world, that means changes in how members engage when it comes to being vaccinated. Lingering perspectives related to vaccine hesitancy may influence members’ reluctance to be vaccinated for the flu despite vaccinations being even more critical to their continued health. Health plans, providers, and pharmacies will have to work harder this year to ensure their health consumers are vaccinated and protected against the flu than they have in years past.

In the 2022–23 flu season, vaccination coverage with ≥1 dose of flu vaccine was 57.4% among children 6 months through 17 years, similar to the 2021–22 flu season (57.8%), and flu vaccination coverage among adults ≥18 years was 46.9%, a decrease of 2.5 percentage points from the prior season (49.4%).

With the unpredictability of flu severity from season to season, outreach and patient engagement to provide information and identify resources for access to vaccinations is integral to a health plan’s ability to proactively communicate with diverse populations through targeted content.

Annually, unvaccinated individuals will cost the healthcare system over $10.4 billion and an additional $17.6 Billion in lost worker productivity.

Flu vaccine patient education can help to prevent:

  • 5 million flu-related illnesses
  • 7 million flu-associated medical visits
  • 105k flu-associated hospitalizations, and
  • 3k flu-associated deaths 

So, what can the healthcare industry do to combat this? With tools like behavioral science, interactive flu vaccine education, and conversational AI at their disposal, it’s possible to see significant increases in flu vaccination rates among members.

Let’s take a closer look at why.

The Foundation: Science of Human Behavior

Let’s start with the basics for any outreach program we run: behavioral science. In this mega-study conducted by The University of Pennsylvania and Walmart, 22 different behavioral science techniques were tested. These 22 varied techniques were embedded into messages delivered through SMS to over 650,000 Walmart pharmacy patients to determine which boosted vaccination rates the highest. Overall, including all these techniques increased flu vaccination rates by an average of 6.7% over a three-month follow-up period.

However, the endowment effect was the most effective technique, which encouraged patients to visit Walmart for a flu vaccine reserved specifically for them. By telling a person a particular flu shot is ‘reserved for you’ and already belongs to them, the vaccine becomes a tangible thing of value that they own. The Endowment Effect is an emotional bias to put a higher value on owned objects. This approach also uses the technique of Loss Aversion, a bias that makes us care nearly twice as much about avoiding loss than receiving an equivalent gain. In this case, if you don’t claim your flu shot, you’ll lose something you own.

We use behavioral science in every program we deploy for our clients, but this study specifically and the endowment effect itself was the basis with which we built our flu vaccination solution for the 2022-2023 flu season. What UPenn and Walmart didn’t have, though, was the following few factors that pushed our flu program beyond even this study.

Streaming flu vaccine patient education

With so much flu vaccine hesitancy in our post-COVID world, flu vaccine patient education about the safety and efficacy of vaccinations is a necessary step, and departing from the mundane pamphlets and brochures of the past by utilizing streaming health content is an extremely effective way to do this.

fotonovela to help improve flu vaccine patient education

The content we’ve produced for flu vaccine education is a series of fotonovelas, which are auto-forwarding image-based stories with a visual interface similar to the stories feature on Instagram. Fotonovelas are ultimately a health literacy tool, but at the same time, they make learning fun and easy (80% of learners on our platform report liking or loving the fotonovela content type).

In this specific flu fotonovela below, the characters featured resonate with diverse audiences, the storylines detailed transcend linguistic and cultural barriers to deliver essential information, and the tone provides empathy and support on the path toward the desired call to action. The best part is that health patients who view a Fotonovela are 72% more likely to get vaccinated.

2-Way conversations uncover barriers

Having 2-way conversations allows you to gather insights about your members that can inform future communication.

  • What is their sentiment toward the program and plan?
  • Why haven’t they been vaccinated?
  • Have they already been vaccinated, and we don’t know?

Knowing why they haven’t been vaccinated allows the plan to respond with education and resources to assist.

  • Do they need help figuring out where to go? Send them the information to their nearest pharmacy.
  • What about if they’re not sure they need a flu vaccination? Send them a Fotonovela to educate them!

Multiple channels, multiple languages

The UPenn and Walmart mega-study tested SMS messages, but why stop there? A large part of an effective engagement strategy is meeting members where they are. As such, our solution includes SMS, IVR, and email channels. Take the concept of meeting members where they are one step further, and you’ll get the ability to deploy this vaccination solution in both English and Spanish. This means reaching more of your population in the way they want to communicate.

Tackle flu early and effectively

The CDC recommends that everyone six months and older, especially people at higher risk, should get a flu vaccine annually to reduce their risk of contracting seasonal flu, alleviate the severity of symptoms, and decrease the likelihood of experiencing major health complications if infected. The importance of each individual vaccinating against the flu needs to be communicated to members through targeted, succinct, and easily understandable materials delivered through channels to reach them where they are most apt to respond and be motivated to act. Studies have found that patients who are informed and effectively motivated are also more likely to adhere to their treatment recommendations.

Our flu vaccination solution

mPulse Mobile’s flu vaccination solution uses proven behavioral science, dynamic content, and an omnichannel approach to overcome common vaccine barriers and get more members vaccinated. With over 15M Flu vaccination touchpoints sent to Medicaid, Medicare, and Commercial members by mPulse in the last two years using its 2-way Natural Language Understanding platform, we have learned from millions of past vaccine conversations in both Spanish and English. We use behavioral science in a relatable and quick experience and employ Fotonovelas to empower members to act. We can help overcome common barriers and resistance by listening for vaccine readiness.

For more information on this flu vaccination solution and a live demo on how we can improve your flu vaccine patient education, register for our webinar, Double Your Vaccination Rates for Your Health Population.

Frictionless Healthcare, Part 2: Using Reciprocity to Increase Motivation

Posted on by Eden Brownell

Behavioral science describes the study of behavior through experimentation and observation. Behavioral scientists study when and why individuals engage in specific behaviors by examining the impact of factors such as conscious thoughts, motivation, social influences, contextual effects, and habits. This week, we will look at how reciprocity can be used in healthcare design and content.

________________________

Dear reader, have you ever wondered what could make you not want to drop a hotel towel on the floor after the first use? Well, a card in a hotel bathroom might do it if it were written the right way. My good friend, Robert Cialdini, and his colleagues investigated this (okay we aren’t really good friends, but a girl can dream, right?) by testing multiple different card appeals to see which would lead to the highest rate of behavior change. They found that neither the basic environmental-protection message urging us to save some no name penguin (although, feel free to name him whichever way you like) nor the message with cooperation appeal could hold a candle to a different kind of push – our need to reciprocate. 

 The most effective way to induce the desired response was to give the donation first then ask a guest to cooperate in this effort. The message with reciprocation appeal, giving first read: 

 “WE’RE DOING OUR PART FOR THE ENVIRONMENT. CAN WE COUNT ON YOU? Because we are committed to preserving the environment, we have made a financial contribution to a nonprofit environmental protection organization on behalf of the hotel and its guests. If you would like to help us in recovering the expense, while conserving natural resources, please reuse your towels during your stay”.

 This method reported almost a 47% success rate, which was significantly greater than the cooperation condition. Why? Because the hotel donated money first on behalf of its guests and only then asked them to join in on it. You didn’t need to reuse your towel, but you felt sort of obliged to. If you didn’t recycle (help them claim the money back), well, you would probably feel a little bad, which is reciprocity in a nutshell. 

Reciprocity in Healthcare

But what does this story have to do with healthcare? The principle of reciprocity means you are more likely to comply with a request if it comes from someone who has previously done something for you, and in healthcare, obtaining compliance is a constant goal. Whether it’s urging members to get their preventive screenings or convincing patients to diet and exercise to bring down their A1C, driving healthy action is important to plans and providers, and reciprocity is a powerful tool to get this done. Let’s review one other case study before taking a deeper look at this in healthcare setting.

Want to learn more about using reciprocity in healthcare? Watch the on-demand webinar » 

 In this next example, the British Behavioral Insights Team joined forces with the NHS Blood and Transplant, the Department of Health, Government Digital Services, and DVLA to investigate a way to increase signups to the organ donor registry. It ended up being more complex than expected and was one of the biggest trials in the history of the UK public sector.

 Given the subject of this blog, you might have already figured they used reciprocity in a clever way to reach their goal. They inserted short phrases with various behavioral science techniques embedded into an existing vehicle tax webpage, and linked it to the organ donor register, which appeared after a user had finished obtaining their vehicle tax. The best-performing behavioral science technique (surprise, surprise) was the reciprocity appeal, which outperformed the existing webpage by roughly 100,000 registrants per year. Here is how it read: 

 “If you needed an organ transplant, would you have one? If so, please help others.”

 Oftentimes, healthcare organizations can approach a lot of healthcare problems with an eye towards getting members to provide them with information (even though they have a tendency not to). The trick is to flip this process by providing the member with something valuable first and encouraging them to think about these issues on their own before we ask them to share their thoughts and feelings, which is called value first design.

 In the context of digital product experiences, users are more likely to engage with your product if you first provide value to them. They’ll be more likely to trust you and reciprocate. This concept is even more important when you’re about to ask for something big from your users, such as signing up for something or closing a healthcare gap. In part 3 of this blog series, we’ll dive into the specific architecture of outreach and how to build in reciprocity by combining behavior science and streaming health education to create a value first design.

People of mPulse: Eden Brownell, Lead Behavioral Strategist

Posted on by mPulse Team
Meet Eden Brownell, mPulse Mobile’s Lead Behavioral Strategist and resident expert in behavioral science, user design, and public health! As a major contributor to the science behind the engagement programs crafted at mPulse, her efforts help healthcare organizations adjust their initiatives to meet the health needs, boost the confidence levels, and address cultural sensitivities in meaningful ways for their members- essentially reimagining health engagement for the modern age. Eden finds fascination in the intricacies of human behaviors and enjoys “geeking out” (as she loves to put it) on research projects that contribute to the design of our solutions.

“I Love Studying People”

Eden’s journey into this world of behavioral science and healthcare communications started at Saint Michael’s college where she graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and Sociology/Anthropology. “I love studying people…at first thought I wanted to be a child therapist and work in more of a one-on-one setting,” Eden explained. “I did that for about a year and a half and realized I was too close…but I still wanted to work in healthcare and helping people.” That’s when she discovered public health and subsequently went on to get her master’s degree in Public Health focused in Community Health from Boston University. And Eden is already making a stamp on the healthcare world. She has been awarded an Innovators of Healthcare award by UnitedHealthcare in recognition of her contributions towards a program incorporating social determinants of health data into clinician workflow processes to improve care management and enhance plan members’ health. She is also a collaborator on a Boston Medical Health Equity Accelerator pilot program initiative that aims to improve communication with expectant mothers, uncover care barriers and improve health outcomes for both the mother and child in at-risk populations and underserved communities. The program focuses on supporting prenatal patients through their journeys through the provision of general pregnancy education, preeclampsia support, substance use reduction and cessation, housing instability and mental health management. She has been bringing that expertise and experience to mPulse and our solutions as well over the last few years. As our resident behavioral science expert, Eden is a central figure in the creation of, and educating on the strategy behind our programs. Because she has a vast skill set in Content Design, Applied Behavioral Science, Human-Centered Design, Data Analysis, and Social Innovation, she’s an integral member of the team that crafts the outreach and messaging in all the solutions deployed by mPulse Mobile. She also is an esteemed voice for us in the industry on education within the realm of behavioral science and engagement strategy. She, along with Greg Gould, her counterpart Engagement Strategist at mPulse, have been conducting a 5-part webinar series focusing on behavioral science in healthcare. Essentially, they are advocating for healthcare companies to take an outward look at how other industries and major corporations leverage behavioral science to motivate, inspire and drive action in their consumers, fuel behavior change. Then they teach these organizations how to take that and apply it to their own engagement efforts. She was also recently featured on the popular HIT Like A Girl Podcast, A community committed to elevating Women in Healthcare & Health IT, to discuss her contributions to reimagining health engagement for the modern age.

Making a Difference through Science

In her tenure with mPulse, Eden has made significant contributions to mPulse’s Engagement Strategy team through the initiation of mProv Studio: a weekly, interactive design brainstorming studio that offers the team the opportunity to informally brainstorm ways to innovate solutions and make them exciting and engaging. The studio sessions offer the Engagement Strategy team the opportunity to learn more about behavioral science theories and behavior change principles, address integral aspects of the user experience and learning experience design. Additional collaborations are held to expound upon new content and product design ideas to support content development, streaming activities and the delivery of solutions tailored to the daily challenges within the healthcare industry. Currently, Eden is knee-deep in diabetes research in support of the development of an mPulse Mobile training course in Comprehensive Diabetes Care that will utilize behavioral techniques to help diabetics to optimize their health. The 6-month Diabetes Management program consists of a series of interactive initiatives designed to aid member diabetic patients in: Learning to manage their condition; Examining their personal health beliefs; Increasing their self-efficacy; Setting personal goals and improving their day-to-day diabetes management habits. This is all wrapped up in a solution that includes SMS messaging and versatile multi-media learning experiences to utilize the best that each modality has to offer. This program will empower members to actively participate in their health betterment by learning and practicing the skills of active diabetes management.

Goats, Bulldogs, & Eden

Clearly Eden is incredibly busy as an ambassador, thought leader, and behavioral science expert for mPulse, but she still makes time for personal endeavors. She recently became a certified Yoga Instructor under the International Yoga Alliance and branched out into the exciting world of Goat Yoga! She is a dog-mom to Cooper & Magnolia, her two French Bulldogs, as well as being an avid thriller fiction reader and an aspiring Charcuterie Board designer. The views from her beautiful home office in Boston, Massachusetts are the envy of many members of the mPulse team who are all grateful for her valued contributions and enduring optimism.