Closing the loop on the last mile in healthcare to improve health outcomes
SameSky Health hosted a webinar, Closing the loop on the last mile in healthcare to improve health outcomes, to discuss how we’ve enhanced member experiences, improved health outcomes, and guided members to the care, tools, and resources they need using our CultureGuide® solution. Abner Mason, founder and CEO, and Meredith Welsh, senior vice president of health operations for SameSky Health, presented strategies and tactics to effectively engage members in their health journey. View the recording below.
The last mile in healthcare can mean something different for each person. Through our own engagement and interactions with health plan members, we’ve found that the last mile may be as simple as getting transportation to an Annual Wellness Visit with a doctor, or as complex as the exchange of health data between providers and tools. Other examples include things like language competencies, education on how to use what is available, access to care, and much more.
We know that closing the last mile can be very challenging, which is why we need to start by building a foundation of trust with each member. We’ve found that trust is critically important because it’s a catalyst for action. When your members trust you, they feel comfortable, informed, and supported, which motivates them to take the action you are asking them to complete. Trust also improves the effectiveness of your communication. If your members trust you, they are more likely to listen, process what you are telling them, and understand the implications of the action you’re requesting of them.
But how do you build member trust, particularly within digital engagement? It’s important to take a multifaceted approach to be able to build that trust and get members to act and close the loop in their healthcare journey.
Personalize content and member journeys: Nuance content according to member attributes and honor the member’s preferences.
Listen: Members want to know they are being heard, so understand member needs and respond appropriately.
Build connections: Leverage member interactions and earn trust. The more we learn about the member, the more we can use it to personalize our messaging and drive action.
Be consistent: Rather than campaigns or transactional interactions, we believe that annual journeys with consistent outreach throughout the year achieve the best results.
Reciprocity: Engage members in a bidirectional relationship and show up throughout the year. Provide resources and be there to listen and learn about the members.
Address barriers: Whether members have a transportation barrier, housing need, food insecurity, or mental health barrier, provide information that helps members overcome those barriers as well as helps them trust that you understand their lived experiences.
“Personalization is key. If you treat everyone the same, it’s hard to build trust, and it’s hard to get people to engage with you. What you’re saying is that what makes a person who they are is not important and that their life journey, their trust for the healthcare system, their experiences with healthcare, and how the social determinants of health uniquely impact them doesn’t matter… If Netflix, Amazon, and the rest of society can start tailoring things for their members, then we are going to have to do the same in healthcare because people are going to expect it.””
Every member is unique whether it is in cultural background, level of knowledge, or communication preferences. A consistent, multimodal communication approach should be used to personalize the member experience, reduce member abrasion, increase health literacy, and empower members to engage in their health. We have found that if you reach out to members using two or more modalities (phone call, voicemail, text, email, etc.), and if you culturally nuance and provide relevant, personalized content to them, you can honor those member preferences and significantly drive outcomes such as increasing how likely they are to have an Annual Wellness Visit.
Building trust takes time. It isn’t instant and it isn’t transactional; it has to be a member-centric approach, and it takes time to get to know your members enough to get them to act. In the first twelve months of using our CultureGuide® solution to drive Annual Wellness Visits with nearly 40,000 hard-to-reach, hard-to-engage members, 60% of these members attended an Annual Wellness Visit because of our successful, personalized approach in building trust and providing relevant information. The average time was 141 days from our first outreach to their wellness visit date. We didn’t tell them every week to go in for their visit, but instead we provided them with pertinent, relevant information year-round, continued to show up, removed some of their barriers, and gently nudged them towards these actions. The process of building trust and respecting members for who they are and where they are in their life experiences helped to close gaps in care and close the loop in their healthcare journeys.
“It turns out when you treat people like who they are matters, and prioritize their experience, we can actually deliver great results for our health plan partners.””
How can health plans know that gaps are being closed through this CultureGuide® approach? At SameSky Health we leverage multiple sources to understand member behavior, further personalize the CultureGuide® journey, and close the loop for our partners in understanding that the member has completed the last mile.
First, we understand member behavior. We learn who’s clicking on links. We evaluate what the sentiment is when people are sending inbound text messages. We tie resource utilization to our discovery screener where we ask individuals information about their social drivers of health challenges, behavioral health needs, and clinical needs. We’re able to understand if they are actually going to the desired source or outcome.
Next, we get self-reported data. We know everyone won’t self-report, but we discover if there’s a way that we can follow up so that members can tell us if they were able to access the provided services. Personalizing this discovery throughout the entire wellness journey is beneficial so that we can improve the self-reported outcomes as well.
Lastly, we couple all of this with partner data. This partner data could be claims data coming in from the health plan or it could be from other partners. We work to understand how our clients want to configure annual health journeys, where they want to provide resources, and what outcomes they are trying to achieve. We determine how we can integrate our systems with partner data to create a more holistic picture of each member.
We know that no one source is always perfect, so a multipronged approach is the best method to get an overall view and understand what’s happening with members. It also helps us predict the needs and ways in which we continue to evolve our strategy for collecting this data and understanding who is or isn’t closing the loop.
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