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Building Out Nontraditional Services at Your Health System

Analysis  |  By Christopher Cheney  
   October 16, 2018

As health systems continue to expand into retail clinics, telehealth and other nontraditional offerings, gauging patient expectations and engagement are primary goals.

Navigating, measuring, and marketing are crucial to successfully establishing healthcare services beyond the hospital walls, according to a pair of patient access executives at this week's ATLAS conference in Boston.

"The entry points into the system are complex—there are a lot of different entry points into your health system. Hard wiring all of those so you can create some sort of seamless experience is a challenge," said Julie O'Toole-Black, vice president of access and operations at Indianapolis-based Community Health Network.

Along with measuring performance and marketing new service offerings, helping patients to navigate increasingly complex and sprawling integrated health networks is essential.

Providence St. Joseph Health has pursued a two-pronged navigation strategy for patients, said Karen Appelbaum, MHA, director of patient engagement and operations at the Renton, Washington-based health system.

"We thought of it partly as a digital strategy—designing better digital tools so people could self-serve and navigate to their best options. But that does not happen overnight and we're not quite there," she said.

"The other part is our contact center strategy—we call it our patient engagement center. While we are building our digital tools, we want to have great human service to help people navigate care."

Providence St. Joseph has made the two approaches complementary, Appelbaum said. "We have been able to learn from our human service to inform the digital strategy. With the data we have been collecting from the contact center, we have been building a chat bot to help patients navigate to the right setting."

Measuring new offerings
 

Providence St. Joseph monitors several measures to gauge the performance of nontraditional services such as the health system's Express Care Clinic retail settings, Appelbaum says.

"We look at factors such as our new patient acquisitions—how many new patients are we bringing into our system. We also look at how well we are tethering them to our system—are they connected with us, do they establish primary care? At our contact center, we measure conversion rates—do we set appointments when people call us, do we refer them to Express clinics, do we get them into primary care?"

A key metric has prompted Community Health Network to scrutinize its telehealth partnership with MDLive, O'Toole-Black said.

"It has not met the volumes we set to measure. We've attempted to reach out to those patients to ask how it could be a better experience. What we are hearing time and time again is, 'If you could offer virtual connections with my doctor or with my physician office, that is what I am looking for.'"

Offering telehealth as a service is much more than establishing a technical capability, she said.

"You have to take a progressive approach to an alternative care delivery mechanism and recognize it is not just about the means by which patients access care but also who is being accessed. You can throw out a lot of different options, but if consumers don't feel truly connected with their primary care physician, it may not be a popular solution."

Marketing dimensions
 

Marketing nontraditional service offerings has internal and external facets, Appelbaum said.

"For internal marketing, one area that came up right away was our primary care providers. In some cases, their response was, 'Don't take my patients.' We had to engage and partner with them. Part of what we showed in those discussions was we were going to lose consumers anyways if we did not meet their needs," she said.

Appelbaum said the external marketing challenge was similarly pressing because many of the health system's PCP panels were full. "Patients could not get in for months. So, we needed help from our primary care offices. Rather than just turning someone away, we asked them to set up appointments months out but also to refer patients to one of our Express clinics."

Community Health Network has a multifaceted marketing strategy for its nontraditional services, O'Toole-Black said.

"We have a connected-care strategy that is both digital and voice. We engage patients through our website, through direct marketing, and through Facebook and various other social media to make sure we permeate the external environment with our service offerings," she said.

O'Toole Black said external communications about services such as Community Health Network's retail clinic partnership with Walgreens cannot be one-way.

"The typical metrics for success are market share, conversion rate, and patient volume, but mining the voice of the customer is key. As we stand up these alternative sites of care like Walgreens, we have to keep listening to our consumers."

Christopher Cheney is the CMO editor at HealthLeaders.


KEY TAKEAWAYS

Health system patient access executives are playing a leading role in expansion of nontraditional services such as retail clinics.

Data collected at call centers can be used as building blocks for digital patient engagement tools.

There are internal and external marketing dimensions to launching and sustaining nontraditional healthcare services.


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