Leading healthcare organizations from payers to IDNs, PBMs, specialty pharmacies, and hubs have recognized traditional programs for patient engagement are proving ineffective. Mail, telephonic and even app-based tools are not how the modern consumer prefers to communicate. Many consumers have experience engaging with ChatBots and Conversational Agents through automated conversations, and they are demonstrating a preference for this dialogue-based approach. Engaging with companies through messaging conversations is convenient, self-service tools delivered this way are more efficient and communications are tailored and relevant. A recent large cross-industry study found that 69% of consumers consider chatbots the preferred way to engage with businesses for quick answers to simple questions. The shift to conversational approaches for engaging consumers is also aligned to the widespread adoption of mobile phones. Mobile phone ownership is at 90% or above across all key population segments, including lower-income adults and seniors over the age 65.
What does this shift in how consumers prefer to engage mean for pharmacies?
The pharmacy industry is adapting to the rapid increase in specialty medications. These therapies have more complex dosing regimens, a higher potential for side-effects and require closer patient monitoring as a result. The generally higher costs of these medications also make demonstrating improved health outcomes and value critical. To ensure patients are successful, pharmacies must provide high-touch clinical support and they have large teams of support staff based in call centers to check-in, follow-up and assist with patients. But this becomes challenging when consumers are much more reluctant to answer telephone calls. Which is why conversational texting represents a huge opportunity for specialty pharmacies who want to maintain their high-touch approach, deliver it efficiently at scale, and leverage a consumer-preferred channel.
Leading pharmacy organizations have identified this opportunity and are leveraging conversational text messaging approaches to:
- Improve chronic condition medication refill rates by 14PPs
- Increase the number of touchpoints during therapy dosing period by over 3x
- Reduce the average call wait time from 8 minutes to 90 seconds by diverting calls to the text channel
Click here to learn more about these outcomes and how Conversational AI programs improve patient outcomes in the pharmacy space.
