From AMGA’s Group Practice Journal: “Generation Text”

PerfectServe’s patient and family communication (PFC) functionality gives providers a simple and elegant way to engage directly with patients. From texting office directions before an appointment to sending follow-up messages post-discharge to check on patients, this text message-based solution is a quick, effective and automated way to maintain day-to-day contact with a patient population.

PerfectServe customer Park Nicollet tapped into the power of PFC by launching a text message appointment reminder program to help new parents more closely adhere to the recommended schedule for well-child visits. Read more about this tremendously successful program in the article below, which was published in the July/August 2019 issue of AMGA’s Group Practice Journal and is authored by Park Nicollet’s Dr. Gillian Luscri, a pediatrician and one of the originators of the program.

Generation Text

Engaging millennial parents to increase well-child visits

By Gillian Luscri, M.D.

It may come as a surprise that scheduling well-child visits can be problematic for young parents. Many don’t know how often to bring their children in, and the importance of regularly scheduled visits is not always understood.

These encounters are particularly critical during the first three years of a child’s life to ensure prevention, track growth and development, and allow intervention when necessary to promote optimal outcomes. Further, well-child visits create a strong, trustworthy relationship among pediatrician, parent, and child.

Today’s technology makes receiving text reminders for dental appointments, vet visits, car care, and other services almost second nature. But when it comes to the health of our children and keeping them on track with their care plans, we have been slow to engage parents using perhaps the most widespread medium for communication. Millennials respond positively to businesses that reach out to them via text because they prefer texting and are accustomed to doing it regularly throughout the day. They want the efficiency and convenience that smartphones offer for communication related to many aspects of their lives, including appointment reminders.

Origins of the Program

In 2016, Park Nicollet, part of HealthPartners, a nonprofit healthcare system based in Minnesota, launched a text message-based reminder program to proactively support young parents with scheduling well-child visits from infancy to late childhood. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends six visits in the first 15 months (Health Plan Employers Data and Information Set [HEDIS] measure), which fits into the broad scope of 12 recommended wellchild visits by age 3. Children who miss these visits are at increased risk to be diagnosed with preventable health issues.

To promote parents’ adherence to this schedule, our team set five goals aligned with best practices from AAP’s Bright Futures initiative:

1. Keep children on time for wellchild visits
2. Prevent missed visits and gaps in care
3. Improve the patient and parent experience
4. Support Bright Futures—recall and reminder system
5. Improve the HEDIS measure

We partnered with CareWire, a company that provides a text message-based patient engagement solution for healthcare organizations, to launch a pilot program. The system uses an algorithm based on birth dates to send texts at appropriate intervals to parents of children aged 2 months to 36 months. Texts include a direct link that allows parents to easily schedule an appointment. Instead of waiting until the patient is already overdue for an appointment, the idea is to reach out before the next well visit to encourage parents to schedule. The process is seamless and automatic, reclaiming precious staff time previously used to manage reminders (see “Schedule for Well- Child Text Reminders”).

Schedule for Well-Child Text Reminders

Birth to 3 years:

• Text message is sent to family 30 days prior to the next well-child visit interval.
• Interval for sending a text message is based on the child’s date of birth.
• Text reminder is sent only if an appointment is not scheduled in the appropriate timeframe.

3 to 10 years:

• Text message is sent to the family two weeks prior to the next well-child visit interval.
• Interval for sending a text message is based on the date of the child’s last well-child visit.
• Text reminder is sent only if an appointment is not scheduled in the appropriate timeframe.

Onward to Launch

Launching the pilot program with a small patient population (birth to 3 years) enabled us to see results quickly, and early response to the text outreach was positive. As anticipated, parents loved the ease and convenience—a major boost for patient satisfaction. Prior to our texting program, we saw patients an average of one month after the recommended well visit. Only three to six months after initiating the text reminder program, we cut that one-month average gap in half, meaning we were seeing patients close to the AAP-recommended interval.

Implementing a pilot program provided an opportunity to identify and address problems before expanding to a large population. The biggest challenge we faced involved parental consent and whether to design an opt-in or opt-out program. On the advice of our legal and compliance teams, we defaulted to an opt-in program, requiring parents to provide consent to start receiving text reminders. We initially overcame this obstacle by training frontline staff to have parents sign consent forms, but the face-to-face process limited enrollment to parents who were already making and keeping appointments.

Efficient enrollment and expansion required automation— updating the electronic medical record (EMR) to connect with CareWire. Following this integration, parents need not be present in the office if they had consented to text messaging as their preferred appointment reminder. Consent was captured in the EMR.

With enterprise-wide expansion of CareWire to all HealthPartners facilities in 2017, the automated process increased enrollment by tens of thousands. Based on the last reported 12-month period, enterprise-wide enrollment has reached 79,183, which includes HealthPartners and Park Nicollet, and 43,825 for Park Nicollet alone (see Table 1).

Evolution and Expansion

We have expanded the program to our entire clinic care group and, in 2019, we began using text reminders for well visits for children up to age 10. Future goals include incorporating additional languages, as a sizable subset of HealthPartners patients are not native English speakers. In addition, increased enrollment of the Millennial population presents opportunities to use that connection to address various patient population needs—such as reminders for flu vaccines and other immunizations, health metrics monitoring, checks for postpartum depression, and more—to help patients stay on track with their care. The potential for reaching a broad range of the patient population is immense, and the results so far have exceeded our expectations.

A Roadmap for Getting Started

Leveraging technology with a trusted and experienced partner enabled our team to create a program that worked for our patients’ families. Following a digital roadmap, we worked together to build reports derived from actionable, engaging, timely, and relevant data. Based on this experience, here are five recommendations for implementing a successful texting program:

1. Partner with a company that has proven expertise and experience with EMR systems and text messaging reminder services for medical needs.
2. Engage a project champion/ director to guide project design, implementation, effectiveness, expansion, and quality assurance.
3. Assemble a multidisciplinary team. Solicit input from all stakeholders— mobile communication technology partner, EMR vendor, physicians, quality improvement, health information management (HIM), compliance and legal, growth and strategy, and frontline managers.
4. Launch a pilot program with a small population to identify and address problems before expanding to a large population.
5. Initiate the process with a mindset of patience. When people have a great idea, they want it to work right away. Avoid trying to implement the program hastily and without forethought. This endeavor demands careful preparation to ensure success.

Improve Well-Child Schedule Adherence with Patient Engagement

The medical system has long adhered to the tenets of value-based care in the establishment of the periodicity schedule for well-child visits. The American Academy for Pediatrics (AAP) recommends formal screening for infants through adolescence to chart growth and development and to provide early interventions for illnesses and injuries, which provides benefit to both children and the healthcare system as a whole.

“While the end goal of health transformation should be achieving the triple aim of improved health quality, improved population health, and reduced per capita health care costs, this requires investing more, rather than less, in primary, preventive, and developmental care. At no age is this truer than for children, whose health trajectories have health cost implications over decades and lifetimes.” – Charles Bruner, Ph. D., et al[i]

Unfortunately, adherence the well-child schedule is suboptimal, with rates diminishing over time – as low as 41% by the time the child is 15 months old.[ii] For children over age 6, well-child visits help ensure continued health, including assessments on growth, weight, sleep, or signs of physical or mental health issues.[iii] For children with chronic conditions such as asthma, evidence suggests that low well-child visit adherence rates are associated with an increased risk of hospitalizations.[iv]

The reasons behind low adherence rates are complex. Modern families face multiple time constraints, may not know about ongoing well-child visit needs, or may face social or economic challenges that impact their ability to adhere to the periodicity schedule. Pediatric professionals focusing on improving adherence to well-child visits can take a multi-pronged approach:

• Well-Child Visit Reminders: encourage adherence to well-child schedule with automated reminders or suggested appointment timeslots
• Social Determinants of Health: focus health promotion materials on family, community, and social factors, including links to community resources, transportation coupons, etc.
• Pre-Appointment: send appointment reminders and preparation instructions, helping reduce no-show rates
• Lower Readmissions: follow up with children recently released from hospital after injury or illness with automated assessment questionnaires and care plan reminders
• Wellness Education: provide pro-active wellness information and links to appropriate community resources or educational material on your patient portal.
• Chronic Condition Management: identify and track children with special health care needs, sending care plan reminders, ongoing encouragement, and periodic assessment questionnaires to parents to expedite intervention

PerfectServe can provide you pre-scheduled communications as well as two-way messaging to help engage patients and their families in positive health outcomes. PerfectServe’s Patient & Family Communication tool leverages SMS text messages, social determinants of health, and pre-populated workflows to identify patients and families who could benefit from well-child visit reminders, educational materials, or SDOH support. Unlike emails or phone calls, text message communications benefit from high response rates, allowing you to reach out to parents when and where it matters most. Parents can schedule an upcoming well-child visit, answer a wellness survey, or ask a question, with automatic alerts sent to the care team if a patient may need preventative support or outreach.

Working with one of the nation’s largest healthcare systems, we sought to improve well-child schedule adherence rates for children age 0-3 years old. Prior to the program, many well-child visits occurred up to a month after they should have, impacting immunization schedules and early prevention programs. PerfectServe’s Patient & Family Communication tool sent parents a reminder about well-child appointments, leading to 13% more pediatric well-child visits, a tighter adherence to the recommended schedule, and more participation in visits beyond infancy. The program had the benefit of also raising postpartum depression screening rates from 30% to 70%.

Contact us to learn how we can help improve your well-child initiatives.

[i]https://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/sites/default/files/Commentary%20on%20Value%20Based%20Care%20final%20Nov%202017%20pdf%20%28002%29.pdf

[ii] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30305388

[iii] https://health.usnews.com/health-news/patient-advice/articles/2016-02-23/why-older-kids-need-well-child-checkups-too

[iv] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3551592/ ; https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130524104642.htm

The Net Impact of Poor Patient-to-Provider Communication

Poor communication between patients and providers is, unfortunately, all too common.

Poor patient-to-provider communication leads to suboptimal outcomes, including poor health results for patients and wasted resources for providers.

Studies show that patients misremember or completely forget roughly 80 percent of the medical information they receive.

Here’s how poor communication affects both patients and providers and how a text-first strategy can improve overall outcomes.

Why patients miss appointments

The rate of appointment no-shows varies widely, from five to 55%, according to some estimates.
But why do patients cancel as many as 55% of appointments?

Sometimes there are actual logistical reasons for a patient to miss an appointment. If a patient can’t get off work or is too sick to travel, for example, it’s not unusual that he/she would miss an appointment.

But, as one study highlighted, some patients miss or cancel their appointments because they’re afraid of the potential diagnosis, they feel that the provider has disrespected them and they are confused because of miscommunication regarding their provider’s scheduling system.

Poor communication between patients and their providers can cause more frequent patient delays as well as appointment cancellations.

Avoidable delays and cancellations

Interestingly, many of the patient-related delay and appointment issues—ranging from perceived disrespect to lingering fears or worries—could be easily addressed by increased communication efforts on the part of a healthcare provider.
For instance, a mix of tailored education, instructions and alerts can be sent to patients before their appointment, and since more than three-quarters of American adults text regularly, text messaging can be an ideal resource for providers who are looking to improve communication with their patients.

Treatment plans and medication adherence

Keeping open lines of communication — like provider-to-patient texting — can help patients avoid bungled treatment plans and poor medication adherence.
One healthcare study estimated that roughly 25% of Americans don’t follow the treatment plans outlined by their providers. Their reasons varied, but 39% of patients didn’t agree with their clinicians about the diagnosis, 27% had concerns about the cost of treatment, 20% felt that the treatment went against their beliefs and 25% thought the treatment plan was just too complicated to follow.

Better communication between providers and patients can help this 25% of patients understand and follow their treatment plans better.

Miscommunication also leads to poor medication adherence: one study noted that 50 percent of chronically ill patients don’t take their medication properly. When patients fail to follow their treatment plans, they usually hinder their chances for a successful recovery.

Providers have to try to explain their treatment plans clearly and succinctly—failure to do so can lead to suboptimal outcomes. Mobile technology – more specifically text messaging – can play an important role in improving medication adherence by supporting those initial conversations. A “text-first” mobile patient engagement platform can be used to support much more than reminders and actually help provide a touch point that improves their overall health.

Poor health outcomes

Patient delay, missed appointments, and poor medication adherence — these issues are all directly related to poor patient-to-provider communication.
When providers fail to check in with patients or when they fail to fully explain a treatment plan to a patient, this typically leads to suboptimal outcomes.

When patients don’t follow through with their treatments, they usually fail to recover successfully, which oftentimes leads to avoidable readmissions.

Hospital readmission is a critical issue in the United States: one in five Medicare patients in the U.S. each year is readmitted within 30 days of leaving a hospital. However, a recent Harvard Business Review article pointed out that a “hospital would, on average, reduce its readmission rate by 5 percent if it were to prioritize communication with the patients in addition to complying with evidence-based standards of care.”

Suboptimal outcomes lead to poor health results for patients, and repeated hospital readmissions eat up costly and critical provider resources. In order to improve outcomes and avoid patient-to-provider miscommunication, providers must focus on improving their overall communication efforts with patients.

A cost efficient and effective way to reach patients is through text messaging. The right platform not only support automated and on-demand messaging, but it also provides tools for provider staff that help them manage this critical communication channel.

Text messaging holds great promise for improving provider-to-patient communication and, most importantly, outcomes for all.

What physicians need to do to change patient behavior

Changing patient behavior is easier than you think

Engaged patients have better outcomes, but healthcare providers often struggle to find effective — and scalable — ways to empower their patients to play a role in their care.

As the number of patients grows, physicians, nurses and other care team members are more stretched for time than ever and have less time to spend on face-to-face patient care.

Patient and family communication tools give providers more opportunities to answer patient questions, send educational material and keep them engaged with their wellness plans between appointments.

Here’s what physicians and other care team members need to know about how a patient and family engagement tool can change patient behavior.

Driving healthier communities

Healthier communities help drive down the cost and waste in healthcare.

When communities are healthy, they clear out emergency departments, make it easier for individuals to access care and help hospitals avoid costly readmissions. Simple automated text messages with appointment reminders can make a huge improvement in patient show rates, regardless of the patient’s age and socioeconomic status.

For Ridgeview Rehab Specialties, automated text messages with appointment reminders, including scheduling and location details, helped the department reduce its no-show rate by 12.6% over two years, a cost savings of more than $138,000.

Inspiring patients to manage their healthcare

Consumerism in healthcare is driving some patients to be active participants, and patient engagement programs can empower even more patients to become more involved in their care. This kind of patient engagement is especially important for those who live with chronic health conditions.

Patient engagement technology can keep patients focused on their wellness between appointments. Automated provider-to-patient communications — like programmed text messages — can include questionnaires that monitor key health indicators and reminders to refill medications.

Retaining information from appointments

Exam rooms are stressful places for patients, and stress tends to make people forgetful. That’s why repetition is the key to getting patients to remember the details of a diagnosis and treatment plan.

Unsurprisingly, many hospitals and practices turn to provider-to-patient text messages to deliver highly relevant educational information.

Sending text messages with links to pages on your site, PDFs, YouTube videos and your other pieces of digital content makes it easy for patients to find and refer back to them later.

How to move forward with a patient and family communication approach

1. Understand all existing patient engagement activities currently in place and assess each one’s utilization rates.
2. Research the data on your existing patient engagement activities. Then, understand how to consolidate them into a single patient path.
3. Gather the number of mobile phone numbers available to push information out to your existing patient population.
4. Develop a rollout plan for hospitals and affiliated groups / clinics, and determine what marketing efforts you’ll need to create awareness and incentivize patient engagement.

Want more information about patient engagement tools?

Our Patient and Family Communications technology is a text-first comprehensive, flexible and secure. Our solution is proven and is live in more than 10,000 care locations, facilitating more than 42,000 patient interactions every day.

4 smartphones for nurses you should have on your mobility shortlist

Smartphones have the potential to transform the workflow of nurses and other hospital care givers.  

Rather than carry around multiple devices, clinicians can use a single device as a phone, pager and scanner. Crucially, smartphones give them mobile access to the EMR, integration with nurse call and telemetry, and a secure platform for collaboration. 

As a clinical communication and collaboration platform, PerfectServe has partnered with many clients on their transition to clinical mobility with smartphones. We want to use this experience to help other health systems in their journey. 

The first question we hear is usually, “Which device should I buy?”  

The answer is, “It depends!”   

At this point, no one device has emerged as the clear best choice, but PerfectServe can share some key considerations for health systems evaluating mobile devices. 

In this article, we’ll highlight 4 smartphones that belong on your 2019 nursing mobility shortlist. We’ll also provide links to other content that can help you select and implement your clinical mobility solution. 

Zebra Technologies TC51-HC 

Zebra has been in the space for years with their previous MC40 devices, and the Zebra TC51 brings major upgrades, including an HC version targeted specifically at healthcare.  

Modern hardware and Android 7 are protected by a rugged exterior that’s built to survive day-to-day in a nursing unit.  

This hardened device can withstand repeated drops, exposure to liquids, and frequent exposure to healthcare disinfectants.  

As an enterprise device, the TC51 is available with built in telephony, barcode scanning, robust battery capabilities and many more features designed with healthcare in mind.  

Why buy it: Support.  

Zebra and its partner network are well established in healthcare, offering plenty of resources to help your project succeed.  

Apple iPhone 

This device needs no introduction.  

As a consumer-grade device, the iPhone delivers leading-edge hardware and software wrapped in a small, sleek package.  

Compared to most enterprise-specific devices, an iPhone 7 is a low-cost option. However, as a consumer phone, the Apple devices will not offer the ruggedness, battery capabilities, native IP telephony, and other enterprise grade features.  

That being said, the relative cost, form factor, and familiarity of the iPhone (or consumer Android devices) make it a good option in the current device market. 

Why buy it: iOS.  

If your organization prefers the Apple mobile operating system, your device choice is clear. 

Bluebird EF500 

Relatively unknown in the US market, Bluebird has provided mobile computing and payment solutions internationally for over 20 years.  

The Bluebird EF500 is a purpose-built rugged device running Android 6 and capable internal hardware.  

It offers a scanner, strong battery capabilities and native IP telephony. The Bluebird device doesn’t bring the same level of support or technical horsepower as some other Android devices, but it can get the job done. 

Why buy it: Value.  

The EF500 is priced significantly lower than other purpose-built enterprise devices. 

Spectralink Versity 

Spectralink has years of experience providing voice handsets running on hospital wireless networks, and they entered the smartphone market in 2014 with the Pivot. Now they have followed it up with the Spectralink Versity, which rolled out to customers in late 2018.  

Looking at the spec sheet, the Versity checks all the boxes for ruggedness/battery/telephony/etc., and its hardware and Android 8 operating system raise the bar in the enterprise device market.  

We look forward to hearing from some of the first health systems to roll it out. 

Why buy it: Form factor.  

The Versity is slim and light, as close as you will find to a consumer phone in a rugged package. 

This is an exciting time as manufacturers continue to bring improved smartphones to the market. PerfectServe is here to share our experience and help you achieve your goals for clinical communication.  

If you want more information about nurse mobility, check out our tips for how to structure a successful device pilot.  

Presenting the new PerfectServe family

The last three weeks have been some of the most eventful in PerfectServe’s 20-year history. Let’s do a quick recap:

• On January 16, we announced the acquisition of Telmediq, which was recently named the 2019 KLAS Category Leader for Secure Communications Platforms for the second consecutive year.
• One week later, we announced that 2018 was the best year in PerfectServe history, with new records being set for sales bookings and year-over-year sales growth. As a bonus, 2018 also saw the completion of the largest individual agreement in company history.
• This morning, the PerfectServe portfolio grew yet again as we announced the acquisitions of Lightning Bolt, a cutting-edge physician scheduling platform, and CareWire, a text-first mobile patient engagement platform.

So, what does all of this activity mean? To start, PerfectServe – driven by Dynamic Intelligent Routing® – is the solution of choice for healthcare providers looking to solve their most complex clinical workflows. This powerful capability is the foundation of our platform.

But now, there’s more to the story – a lot more. Each brand joining the PerfectServe family is a standout healthcare technology solution in its own right, and we’re bringing them all together under one roof.

The possibilities are endless.

As PerfectServe CEO Terry Edwards noted in his Q&A with Telmediq CEO Ben Moore (now PerfectServe’s Chief Product Officer), combining these best-of-breed platforms is part of a larger goal to ramp up innovation as we bring to market the care team collaboration platform of the future.

To illustrate why these additions are so significant, here’s a quick introduction to each of PerfectServe’s new family members, including some of their distinct capabilities:

• Telmediq, as previously noted, is the top KLAS-rated vendor for secure communications platforms in 2019. With its call center solution, nurse mobility strategy, advanced alert and alarm management capabilities, mass notification functionality and strong customer relationships, this platform brings unmistakable value to the PerfectServe portfolio. Together, PerfectServe and Telmediq offer the most comprehensive set of clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) capabilities on the market, with the two platforms counting more than 500,000 clinical users across 250 hospital sites and 27,000 physician practices and post-acute care organizations.
• Lightning Bolt optimizes physician scheduling workflow with automation technology that brings balance to complex scheduling variables. The company has developed deep domain expertise in the areas of physician workflow, hospital operations, artificial intelligence and professional balance. Lightning Bolt automatically generates more than three million physician hours each month and is the trusted solution for hospitals and health systems working to align the interests of their physicians and facilities to promote work-life balance, productivity and patient access.
• CareWire uses SMS texting – the most widespread communication method – to drive patient engagement. By using text messages, the solution reaches patients and family caregivers of all ages and socioeconomic statuses without requiring an app download or a password. With its encounter navigation assistance and tailored messages that use social determinants of health data, CareWire drives reduced cost and readmissions, improved chronic care management and better clinical outcomes. This accessible approach to care coordination also boosts patient satisfaction. CareWire is currently deployed in 10,000 care locations, where it optimizes the care experience across 42,000 patient interactions per day.

With Telmediq, Lightning Bolt and CareWire, PerfectServe has assembled vital pieces of a puzzle that will take shape over the coming months . The end game is actually pretty simple: Provide healthcare organizations with a patient-centric care team collaboration platform that streamlines and automates workflows to expedite care delivery among all care team members and across all care settings.

In short, by remedying the care coordination challenges that have long existed in the healthcare industry, we want to free clinicians up to do what they do best – treat their patients.

Stay tuned for more news about our journey to build the care team collaboration platform of the future. If you’re coming to HIMSS in Orlando from February 11-15, make sure to visit PerfectServe (booth #1113), Telmediq (booth #6643) and Lightning Bolt (booth #2393).

How to capture positive online reviews for your practice

Whether they’re about restaurants, hotels, service providers or everyday products, online reviews are ubiquitous.

Consumers place a great deal of trust in online reviews because they’re more likely to believe the candid words of a fellow consumer than the curated sales pitch of a business. In fact, what customers write about companies online can have a bigger impact on buying decisions than traditional marketing methods.

But reviews aren’t limited to restaurants and hotels – consumers also use Healthgrades, Google and Yelp to research healthcare providers before scheduling appointments.

Why online reviews have to be a priority

The number of internet-savvy consumers looking to online reviews for healthcare providers might surprise you.

According to a Pew survey, one in five internet users have consulted online healthcare reviews before deciding where to go for healthcare services.

A separate study from the Brookings Institution shows that patients take online reviews very seriously. In fact, patients believe online reviews are just as credible as ratings provided by the government.

With the prevalence of online provider reviews and their role as a key resource for patients who are seeking care, providers should think not only about treating patients for their medical ailments, but also providing excellent customer service.

How to manage your practice’s reputation

It’s never easy to receive negative feedback, but in today’s digital world, it’s inevitable.

A proactive strategy begins with rigorous  monitoring of your practice’s online reputation to understand how your patients perceive your care experience; this understanding can help you formulate an improvement plan.

Bad experiences tend to prompt more online reviews than positive ones, but with the right plan in place, you can encourage your patients to write about their positive experiences as well.

Here are a few simple ways to encourage patients to post about their experiences with your practice:

• Ask. This one’s often overlooked, but simply ask your patients to rate their experience on Healthgrades, Google or Yelp.
  
• Email. If you have current email addresses for your patients, send a brief email with a clear request and easy-to-follow instructions about how to post an online review.
  
• Survey. After appointments, send follow-up surveys to gauge how your patients felt about your practice, and include a link to prompt them to share their feedback on Healthgrades, Google or Yelp.

How PerfectServe makes gathering online reviews easy

If you’re having trouble gathering online reviews, consider using PerfectServe’s patient and family communication functionality.

Our solution automatically triggers a post-visit survey based on activity in the patient’s EMR record. Once the survey is completed, follow-up occurs based on your patient’s feedback.

Here’s how it works:

• If a patient responds with a negative satisfaction score, PerfectServe sends a text message asking him or her to connect with the office for further discussion.
  
• If a patient responds with a positive satisfaction score, PerfectServe sends a message asking him or her to share their experience online, complete with a link to your preferred online review platform.

Our clients have found that 40-50% of patients respond to our online survey when they receive it the day after an appointment, and 15-20% of patients who respond to the survey post a review on Healthgrades, Google or Yelp when asked to do so.

If you’d like more information about how PerfectServe can help you survey your patients more effectively and generate more reviews for your practice, contact us.

Building healthcare’s most advanced care team collaboration platform: An interview with the CEOs of PerfectServe and Telmediq

Since its founding nearly 20 years ago, PerfectServe’s mission has remained the same: to help clinicians provide better care. To service that goal more effectively, both the platform and its range of capabilities have evolved significantly over the last two decades, and the company now stands as a leading provider of cloud-based clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) solutions.

With that focus on creating better patient outcomes in mind, PerfectServe announced today that it has acquired Telmediq, the top-rated KLAS vendor for secure communication platforms in 2018.

Amidst all of the excitement, we sat down with Terry Edwards, President and CEO of PerfectServe, and Ben Moore, CEO of Telmediq, to get their thoughts on the announcement and why it represents such an important step in the march toward true care team collaboration.

Terry, this is obviously a landmark announcement. What’s PerfectServe’s vision moving forward?

Terry Edwards: It all goes back to the concept of “care team collaboration,” a term you’ll hear from us a lot in the coming years. What it means is that we’re trying to eliminate the waste inherent in care delivery workflows and make it easier for clinicians to overcome the care coordination challenges that have existed in the healthcare industry for years.

CC&C—the space that PerfectServe and Telmediq occupy—is a foundational component of this care team collaboration platform strategy. Our vision is to leverage the strengths of these two CC&C solutions to begin building the care team collaboration platform of the future – one that serves all care team members, including the patient.

Ben, it was also announced today that you’ll be joining the PerfectServe leadership team as Chief Product Officer. What excites you about bringing these companies together?

Ben Moore: I’m excited that I won’t have to compete with PerfectServe anymore!

To be serious, though, pursuing the vision Terry outlined will allow our combined companies to have a tremendous impact on the way clinicians care for their patients. Helping to shape the future of products that make such a positive difference is an extremely rewarding opportunity.

From a product standpoint, we’re bringing together two established leaders in the CC&C space, so we have a lot of capability under one roof. Because PerfectServe and Telmediq have different strengths, our strategy is to support both platforms and integrate them such that the strengths of one can be transferred to the other.

Why is now the right time to acquire Telmediq?

TE: Telmediq is widely recognized as a top CC&C vendor, and as Ben points out, its platform has strengths that nicely complement the strengths inherent in the PerfectServe platform. It will bring great value to the PerfectServe portfolio, and as we visualized the pieces of the larger care team collaboration puzzle, Telmediq was really a natural fit.

We also announced today that K1 Investment Management, a private equity firm based on the West Coast, recently became a PerfectServe investor. Their strategic and financial support, coupled with the excellence of the Telmediq platform and the team that built it, make us confident that now is the right time to start executing on our vision of care team collaboration in a deliberate way.

How will this integration of products impact PerfectServe and Telmediq customers?

BM: Integration will take time, and we’re going to be very thoughtful about the process, but the key is that PerfectServe and Telmediq are both cloud-based solutions built on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

In layman’s terms, this is a huge win for our clients, because they’ll be able to maintain the functionality of their current solutions with the option to add new capabilities over time.

TE: This is a theme we’ll be repeating time and time again – no disruptions for clients. We’re incredibly excited about what the future holds, but we’ve also gone to great lengths to ensure that our existing clients experience no lapses in the performance of the product they’ve invested in or the level of service they receive. Clients will always be priority number one.

You’re both very passionate about the role communication plays in providing quality patient care. Does this come from personal experience?

TE: That’s something I really love about how these companies started – Ben and I were both motivated by the experiences of our loved ones.

PerfectServe was actually born from the struggles of my wife, who’s a registered nurse, when she was on call for a private physician’s practice. The process of getting paged and retrieving messages from the answering service, contacting the doctor when required and then relaying necessary information to patients was frustrating and ate up hours of time.

I saw the potential for improvement, and I tapped into my background in the interactive voice messaging industry to build a better answering service solution. We’ve come a long way since the first prototype was finished in 1999!

BM: In my case, an extended hospital stay for my wife and newborn daughter served as the catalyst.

Doctors and nurses do amazing work, but throughout this experience, I was really struck by the cumbersome communication methods being used. The picture didn’t quite add up – physicians using pagers and playing phone tag while their patients used state-of-the-art tech like iPads.

To compensate for these communication shortcomings, I became the de facto care coordinator for my wife and daughter. It was a role I didn’t expect to play, and once we left the hospital, I knew I could come up with a better system. Telmediq launched just a few years later.

In that context, your role as PerfectServe’s Chief Product Officer feels like the next chapter of the mission. Where do we go from here?

BM: As Terry and I have both reinforced, the PerfectServe and Telmediq solutions are already robust in their current forms. But if we’re going to build a comprehensive care team collaboration platform, there’s more work to do.

Today, clinical communication has to overcome both technology silos and people silos. Nurses, hospitalists, primary care physicians and care coordinators may all be using different communication devices and systems in the course of treating one patient. It’s not ideal.

The work ahead of us will reduce breakdowns in communication and ensure that clinicians can collaborate from any location by connecting the siloed people, systems and locations that exist today.

Terry, for those on a time crunch, close by telling us why this announcement is important.

TE: The combination of PerfectServe and Telmediq brings together two best-of-breed platforms in service of a larger goal to bring to market the care team collaboration platform of the future. We intend to be on the front line of innovation as we build a better product for our clients.

Meeting the communication needs of today’s care teams: An interview with CEO Terry Edwards

Terry Edwards, as founder, president and CEO of PerfectServe, has played an instrumental role in evolving the company’s solution from 1999’s version one prototype to today’s product, which has become the most comprehensive and secure care team collaboration platform in the healthcare industry.

Recently, we sat down with Terry to talk about how healthcare communication is changing and how PerfectServe continues to reinvent itself to meet the needs of today’s care teams.

What is PerfectServe?

PerfectServe is a secure cloud‑based communication platform for clinicians. Its focus is to connect doctors and nurses so they can more easily coordinate care.

The thing that makes us unique is a capability that we call Dynamic Intelligent Routing.

This functionality allows us to build algorithms into the platform that automate the communications workflow. This has to do with the “if this, then that” kinds of decisions that are part of a communication process between clinicians to connect the initiator to the right person who can take action at a given moment in time.

We’re like an easy button for clinicians to connect to with each other. By speeding and easing the communications workflow process, we’re able to help them coordinate care more easily.

Communication is such a big part of care. How does PerfectServe define patient care?

The care of a patient is the work of the providers – the doctors, the nurses, the therapists and other ancillary providers. They’re the ones who are interpreting the test results. They’re the ones who are observing and talking to the patients. They’re the hands‑on care providers. Especially in a hospital setting, there’s no one provider – it’s a care team.

Even with certain types of patients, as they transition from the hospital to their home environment, there’s a care team. It may be that the spouse is part of that care team and/or a home care worker as well.

There’s a certain amount of collaboration that needs to occur amongst all of those care team members in order to provide the best care. The ability for them to communicate and connect with the right people for a given situation or a given time of day, that’s the challenge. That’s the piece that we make easy.

What’s on the horizon for healthcare communication? What’s next?

Gartner [a leading research and advisory company], several years ago, coined a term that they call the “real‑time healthcare system.” The real‑time healthcare system is really all about leveraging the increasing amount of digital information inside of a system that’s being created by all these different electronic systems.

If you think back 10, 15 years ago, there was still so much on paper. Now, it’s all electronic. There’s an enormous amount of data that’s being created, but it’s not necessarily being leveraged.

The concept of the real‑time healthcare system is to be able to extract and collect data from these various systems, and then interpret it in ways that can be presented to clinicians, in ways that are relevant to them, so they can take action.

The communications platform serves the unique role of being the engine to receive information from other systems and automatically route a given transaction appropriately based upon the “if/then” variables unique to the situation and recipient. Now, I’m moving beyond person‑to‑person communication.

I’m talking about system‑to‑person communication, where we’re receiving data and then saying, “Oh, this is a critical result and Dr. Smith is the one who needs to get this right now,” and Dr. Smith is the one who can take action. Dr. Smith doesn’t necessarily need to know a whole bunch of other stuff. He just needs to know that.

That’s our role.

As an organization deploys and gets this foundation in place, they have, then, a platform upon which they can begin to automate more and more of these communication workflows to help them provide better care, more efficient care, better quality of care.

As a company, how is PerfectServe evolving to be a platform that can deliver that kind of advanced system-to-person communication?

We’re constantly innovating. When I started PerfectServe over 20 years ago, we were in the physician‑practice office. We started by bringing a technology‑based solution to a human‑centered call answering process, which was just managing phone calls after hours. It was there that we learned about all the complexity in these communication workflows around the doctors.

As time went on and technology evolved, we went from where we were then, which actually was a technology‑enabled services company, to a pure software company. As the Internet expanded, as secure messaging became prominent, texting became prominent, mobile devices became prominent, the Web, etc., we have transformed this company multiple times over the years to take it to where it’s at today.

I expect that we’ll continue transforming into the future.

Could you ever have imagined that it would go from where it was to where it is now?

I knew that it could be a lot bigger when I started it. I had come out of a company called Voice‑Tel in the 1990s. Voice‑Tel was one of the early pioneers in interactive voice messaging. We were a fairly young company. That’s what brought me to Knoxville – starting up the Knoxville operations for Voice‑Tel.

Voice‑Tel was in probably 120 different markets around the United States, as well as into Canada, and down into Australia. We were, at that time, doing over the phone with voice messages what we do with texting and email today. It was a great time. Those were early days of pre‑Internet or when the Internet was just within government and education.

I saw how big Voice‑Tel was, and I knew that PerfectServe could be that big. I didn’t know that it would evolve or turn into what it is today, which is phenomenal.

What separates PerfectServe from other competitors in the marketplace?

I would take it back to that Dynamic Intelligent Routing capability. In most every successful business, there’s something the people in that business know, or there’s an idea they have, that nobody else knows or even thinks exists.

The thing we know is that there is inherent complexity in these communication workflows. And I’m surprised nobody else has figured this out yet, I really am. This is because physicians, departments in a hospital or care teams have ways in which they need to receive information.

It’s not just freeform, everybody’s texting each other, because we’re dealing with what can be life‑threatening information. You don’t just fling a text out to somebody. You need communication processes that are reliable, that are accurate, where you know you can get a message or a call to the right person who is going to take action.

You’ve got to understand and appreciate the workflows of these various groups, then you need software to automate it. If you don’t have that, then you don’t solve the problem. That’s one of the issues with the secure chat capabilities that the EMR companies are trying to bring to the market or some of the other secure texting mobile applications that are just too simple.

They work well for small groups of people who know each other, but they don’t work well across a large enterprise or across organizations. That’s where the process falls down and we have the messy, unsafe communication processes that we have today.

How is Dynamic Intelligent Routing different from some of our competitors’ role-based routing capabilities?

With Dynamic Intelligent Routing, we’re building algorithms that can look at multiple variables that need to be considered in a specific communication process. That differs, for example, from role‑based routing, where someone just is in a role at a given time, because the role could change based on other conditions.

For example, some of the variables that might play into a Dynamic Intelligent Routing calculation include the originating location. Where is this call or text message originating from? What organization or facility? Who is the originator? Maybe, what was that originator’s role? What is the time? What is the day? What is the department as well if it’s an acute care environment? What’s the clinical situation? Then, based on some of those things, what call schedule should we be considering? Is there more than one call schedule that needs to be considered at a given moment in time?

All of that is just to tell us ‘who’ we need to contact. Once we have determined that and we know who it needs to receive it, then the question is how do we communicate with them? Are we delivering a secure message or are we having to send a page because secure messaging isn’t going to work in this particular environment?

If a message is taken or left and it’s not read within a certain amount of time, what do we do to escalate it? That’s what Dynamic Intelligent Routing is. It’s about being able to think through and design those processes, and then being able to process those interactions in real time, automatically to get the right communication to the right person in a way that he or she should be reached.

Imagine I work at a medical group that’s considering using PerfectServe. Why should I sign up?

We’re going to facilitate or enable your communication processes and optimize those for the way in which you work. What that means to you is you’re going to get only the information you should receive, when you should receive it and upon which you should take action.

You’re not bombarded with things that don’t matter, that are irrelevant. You’re not going to be contacted when you shouldn’t be and interrupted, for example. You’re not going to have messages languish that could create a liability for you if you don’t respond, because we’ll build resilience and fail‑safe into those processes.

We’ll probably be able to save you some money, too.