Telephonic care coordination has been around long enough. Designed to be a resource for patients, it has become a cornerstone for #valuebasedcare programs.
Payors and Providers have entire care teams (consisting of nurses and care managers), workflows and infrastructure dedicated to calling and helping patients navigate through their healthcare needs.
The intent is to equip patients with the right resources, education and access points to information, so they can better manage their health, improve efficiency and quality of care – the goals if you are in a #valuebasedcare arrangement.
Yet, the number of patients who engage in this type of a program is abysmally low:
- Missing phone numbers – Care teams generally have phone numbers for 25-40% of their members. That minimizes your ability to outreach to all the members that are in your VBC arrangement.
- Low response rate – Of those calls made, only 10-15% actually answer the calls. That means, for every 100 members in a VBC arrangement, only about 3-4 patients/members respond to a call. Patients don’t recognize the phone number they’re receiving the call from and frequently treat it as spam.
- Interruption to their days – Even those who respond to the call, are in the middle of their day – either working or tending to their children, etc – they cannot seem to get off the phone fast enough, so they can get back to what they were doing
- Lack of relationship and context – have you ever answered a call from a number you didn’t recognize, and spent the first several minutes determining if the other person is trying to sell you something, or worse yet, is a scam? Frequently, patients don’t have a basis of trust to interact with a stranger on the phone. Let alone discuss their health information.
If you participate in, partner with, or run a telephone-based care coordination program, do these challenges ring true? What other pain points have you experienced?