Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Patient Engagement Platform assists bariatric sufferers stay on track for procedures

A patient engagement platform is assisting Fresno Heart and Surgical Center in California keep better track of potential sufferers, tracking their progress and whether they victoriously lose weight through its bariatric surgery program.

Aaron Lloyd, director of the Bariatric and Minimally Invasive Surgery Program at the Fresno Heart and Surgical Center in California, claims his agency had struggled to follow up on potential sufferers and track them through its program.

“We utilized to have 3,000 to 3,500 potential sufferers on the path to getting bariatric surgery in a given year. But in that similar year, we would merely operate on a third of these individuals,” he claims. “Somewhere along the way, we lost 2,000 to 2,500 potential sufferers. We knew that if we could track where they were lost, we could intervene.”

Clearly, the practice was missing out on a lot of potential revenue, but sufferers also were missing out on what could be life-changing surgery.

Fresno Heart’s bariatric program gives in-person and online seminars for prospective sufferers to learn more about the procedure, but there was no follow-up work done to make certain these people became patients. And because 60% of patients attending a seminar don’t take the next step toward scheduling a consultation, it was missing out on possible interventions.

So, the program contracted for a patient engagement platform from the Sequence Health. The patient engagement platform supports tracking those coming to seminars, following up with automated emails motivating a consultation and by targeting re-engagement with sufferers going through the procedure for surgery to see where they are in the journey and if they have any requirements not being dealt.

Preparatory steps for patients involve completing a nutrition class, getting tests and evaluations from a primary care physician, which involve a psychiatric evaluation, lab work, a sleep study and might be cardiac and diabetes clearance.

What makes Sequence Health different from other vendors is not merely offering lead tracking of prospective clients, but extra services like administering the website, hosting online seminars and conducting search engine optimization.

The greatest hurdle within the initiative was getting the right data, in accordance to Lloyd. “Do not be afraid to invest in data,” he counsels. “Our system was merely as good as the people using it. You require taking time to put in the data to impact meaningful change.”

Fresno Health’s bariatric program yet is missing one component, Lloyd claims. The agency would like a patient portal so patients can more conveniently communicate with providers and have access to their own information, and the vendor has been inquired to build the portal.

 

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