To achieve and sustain a highly effective patient contact rate, health providers must go beyond simply uploading a list of patient contacts to self-serve contact management solutions using generic message scripts. 

Consistently reaching patients above 90-95% of the time, on each and every contact attempt, requires more sophisticated contact strategies, more advanced contact management technologies and more responsive communications support.

Many self-serve contact management solutions, including Televox, typically assume that when they contact a patient that they have reached a person—limiting the effectiveness of the contact to adequately deliver the information contained in the message.  There is no detection of answering devices or services, limited flexibility in contact design and execution strategies and only minimal controls to impact the quality of the message presented to the patient.

The net result for providers relying on these methods is that patient contact rates remain artificially low; as do patient expectations of quality and their overall satisfaction with these services.

SkyCreek Health leverages advanced patient contact management technologies and a dedicated patient contact management solution model to design, deploy and refine the quality of patient messages and the contact strategies used for delivery to optimize contact reach performance and overall message absorption.

We leverage high-end voice talent on every message we deploy for our customers as well as advanced text-to-speech technologies to minimize the apparentness of the underlying technologies (sounds like IVR) being used.  We employ customizable outbound and inbound patient contact strategies that dynamically adjust delivery and retry strategies, contact modes, prompt presentation and contact patterns to optimize contact efforts on an individual patient by patient basis—all to make the most of every contact attempt.

Lastly, we do all this while remaining highly competitive on price and service quality.

Confirming patient appointments and other care compliance indicators is not just good practice; it’s good business.

With the increasing cost and impact of patients missing appointments and not complying with prescribed care requirements and guidelines, it is more imperative than ever for health providers to optimize their efforts to confirm patients throughout each step in the care lifecycle.

SkyCreek Health provides advanced technology and a highly consultative dedicated patient contact management solution to help health providers reach and sustain a minimum 50% confirmation rate on their key patient management objectives. 

With 20 years of contact management experience, SkyCreek Health is uniquely positioned to elevate patient confirmation results—from utilizing individualized patient contact strategies, high-quality message design and delivery techniques, dynamic delivery and conditional contact management capabilities to our unmatched experience in high-quality, high-volume confirmation management—we’re a unique provider.

Consistently delivering effective, high-quality and differentiating patient communications requires highly responsive contact management resources.

With changes in resource availability, schedule-impacting external events like storms, natural disasters, national emergencies and other unexpected events affecting patients, patient-centric health providers must be able to quickly design, approve and deploy upgrades or new automated communications, keeping patients informed, calm and out of the call center, thus reducing additional and unnecessary costs.

SkyCreek Health’s dedicated patient contact management model delivers this communication responsiveness level to health providers, while remaining price and quality competitive.  This approach, versus self-service solutions, provides superior service and communications quality, while providing the support needed to expedite new and routine patient communication program changes and setups–even same-day..

The typical predictive dialer, off-the-shelf interactive voice response (IVR) solution or self-serve contact management solution offers little more than an generic interface to bulk contact your patients on a fixed price per minute or fixed price per attempt basis. 

The reality in today’s more mobile society is that reaching patients, connecting with them in a manner that engages them and results in them consistently confirming appointments and complying with other care measurements requires a more strategic and technically advanced approach. 

To move the needle, health providers must increase the quality of their messaging to minimize the apparentness of the technology making the contact; leverage more sophisticated and personalized contact and retry strategies; and more intelligently instruct and prompt patients based on conditional contact variables, like device detection, to ensure optimal response and confirmation rates.

SkyCreek Health routinely produces a 20-25% increase in patient confirmation rates over these less precise, less optimized patient contact solutions; all while simultaneously lowering overall cost to deliver.  Our dedicated patient contact managers work with clients to understand both business and patient experience objectives and devise customized contact strategies to engage patients and achieve optimal confirmation rates—minimizing resource waste, low-probability contact cost and the impact on patient care and experience.

Cost efficiency is a frequently overlooked aspect of patient communications management. 

Most companies offering automated patient communications employ a one-size fits all, self-serve approach that solely align contact costs to the usage of shared contact resources.  These generic solutions do little to optimize patient contact strategies, leverage advance contact management techniques or incorporate best-practices and lessons-learned as to how to most effectively reach, engage and motivate patients to achieve desired outcomes. 

As a result, the typical health provider utilizing automated patient communications is often grossly over paying for these services without understanding that more customized approaches not only provide a better quality experience for patients but that they are key to lowering cost and achieving optimal efficiency and effectiveness of these programs.

Further optimizing the cost efficiency of patient communication programs requires a more strategic approach and advanced capabilities to prevent wasted calling attempts that inflate program cost and result in higher per minute pricing—employing more sophisticated call load balancing, contact throttling, adaptive retry strategies, customized calling parameters and leveraging conditional contact management techniques.

Extending patient confirmation practices beyond appointments is rapidly becoming a necessity for health providers who need to leverage the economies of scale of automated communications to assure patients are following prescribed care guidelines, following prescribed medication regiments and adhering to discharge, referral and ongoing health maintenance requirements. 

With the financial risk of disqualified Medicaid readmissions increasing year over year, SkyCreek Health leverages its core multi-channel patient contact management and patient survey capabilities to design customized, condition-specific patient compliance management processes that can automatically engage patients, measure their compliance at key intervals in the care lifecycle and quickly alert medical staff of patient deviations—indicators of potential readmission risk. 

Leveraging data standards to integrate compliance efforts with other core patient management systems, conditionally managing individual patient contact attempts and tailoring message and interaction options on an individual or condition-specific basis are critical to attaining high compliance measurement results.

We leverage these technologies and techniques along with our nearly 20 years of large-scale experience confirming appointments to provide a customized solution for health providers wanting to further insulate themselves from the risk and cost of patient readmissions.

In today’s more scrutinized health care world, ensuring that the entire health care operation is operating from the same page is increasingly important to containing cost and improving the overall patient experience.

At the clinic/office level, patient actions and contacts must be coordinated system-wide to prevent negative patient experiences and maintain high levels of administrative efficiency and resource utilization.

SkyCreek Health developed an innovative, fully-secured web-based clinic administration interface that allows office managers to easily understand recent patient communications, what patients have confirmed for today’s appointments and what patients are in jeopardy of becoming potential no-shows.

Managers can quickly issue manual or automated follow-up communications to reach “in jeopardy” patients and coordinate the results of these last-attempt, local patient contact efforts across the organization through an integrated patient management system that provides real-time appointment and patient status updates and reporting across the entire health system—further optimizing individual patient management and overall patient experience.