Patients are used to getting bombarded with communications from their insurance providers. From text messages and emails to phone calls and snail mail, it can be overwhelming for patients to keep track of all the information coming in.
Welltok aims to streamline the communications so members’ inboxes look a little less chaotic. This week, the healthcare software company announced the launch of its new platform EngageME, which is aimed to make communications from healthcare insurance providers to patients more efficient and accurate.
“Not only were we part of the solution to help communicate, we were becoming part of the problem — part of the problem being over communication in an uncoordinated fashion to members,” AnneMarie Gramling, senior vice president of engagement services at Welltok, told MobiHealthNews. “We started to look at how to help solve for that problem. We don’t want to communicate just to communicate. We want to get the right message across at the right time so we help someone take the next step in their [healthcare] action.”
The new platform will let customers, typically healthcare payers and providers, send information to clients. But the hub also keeps track of how many messages are going out.
Oftentimes different departments don’t communicate with each other — for instance, someone in billing may not know that their colleague over in customer service just sent out an email. This platform seeks to change that by letting everyone in the company see when a patient last received a communication.
“Most of our clients are pretty siloed,” Gramling said. “It is a very common structure to operate that way. They don’t have tools at their disposal to really show them holistically all the messages that are happening and the timing and the intention.”
The platform will also help companies look at different demographics and see if there is a particular population that is receiving an overload of information. It will be able to pinpoint groups that are not getting much communication, so that the company can then reach out to these folks. It will also let the insurer see what mode of communication the patient responds to best, so that they can communicate through that medium in the future.
Gramling stressed that this platform will allow companies to set up parameters around how much communication is too much, and which information is the most important.
“You can actually put the tool back in the hands of our clients and give them visibility,” Gramling said. “It’s about bringing the volume down so you don’t drown out the things that are really critical.”
