A Simple Way to Modernize Current COVID-19 Vaccination Efforts
Much of our collective COVID-19 vaccination success hinges on principles of patient experience: the basics of clear patient communication and easy appointment navigation. Unfortunately, logistical bottlenecks and lack of efficient communication channels have led to patient confusion, vaccine spoilage, and an overall stressful experience for both patients and clinicians.
While the U.S. has made significant progress in distributing COVID-19 vaccines to high-priority groups, the limited and unpredictable vaccine supply, coupled with varying regimen timelines for different vaccines, have made transparency, awareness, patient scheduling, and adverse event reporting even more challenging. Local teams often have to make real-time decisions about vaccination appointments based on vaccine supplies and communicate any changes to patients as quickly as possible. As younger and healthier individuals become eligible for the vaccine and demand continues to outpace supply, deploying automated scheduling, seamless patient communication, and robust systems for symptom tracking will be critical.
An effective way to address our current vaccine challenges is to deploy a lightweight, digital-first approach that combines automated awareness of vaccination appointments, reminders, patient-facing information, and symptom reporting. Patient communication solutions like those offered by Memora Health enable clinical staff to efficiently scale otherwise manual communication and administrative work. This both contributes to a better experience for patients and reduces wasted staff time and stress. The case study of how CHAS Health leveraged Memora’s care delivery platform to quickly adjust and manage their vaccination rollout to tens of thousands of patients shows how a simple patient-centered messaging approach is highly effective in engaging and communicating with patients — even beyond vaccination efforts.
Unblocking Vaccination Bottlenecks
Vaccination bottlenecks create stressful and unpredictable work for both clinic staff and patients. Among the most pronounced bottlenecks are:
1. Scheduling vaccination appointments — scheduling or rescheduling eligible patients for their vaccine doses is not only logistically challenging, but also can require excessive staff time managing phone calls, answering questions, and ensuring enough patients are scheduled for the day to prevent vaccine spoilage.
Solution: Automated patient outreach and pre/post-scheduling notifications can dramatically increase efficiency and ease logistical complexities. The information must be easy-to-access for patients and be patient-centric for maximum success. SMS-based outreach with clear information and instructions has been particularly effective in managing appointments, providing transparency around immediate changes (i.e. delayed shipments, extra doses), and creating a positive patient experience.
2. Limited and disjointed communication channels — relying on a single communication channel, such as phone calls or portals with limited EHR integration and adoption, will prevent clinic teams from reaching many vaccine-eligible patients. Even if multiple channels are in place, these channels often lead to data silos where creating a consolidated and accurately-matched data repository is time-consuming and challenging. Having limited or disjointed communication channels prevent engagement across different populations, making the vaccination effort more complex.
Solutions: Implementing unified, multi-channel communication options that are readily available and easy to use is essential to a successful vaccination effort, especially as eligibility criteria are broadened. Similarly, ensuring that patients’ language needs are met is critical for encouraging adherence and building trust with vulnerable communities. Meeting patients where they are and adapting to their communication and cultural needs not only drives health literacy but also enhances trust in the vaccination effort overall.
3. Vaccination appointment attendance — after managing the initial scheduling hurdles, it’s critical to ensure patients keep their appointments or reschedule them in a timely way to allow other eligible patients to take newly-open slots.
Solution: Sending appointment reminders, directions, and information about necessary pre-vaccine health assessments are important components to increase attendance. Automating these reminders and digitizing patient-facing information reduces manual workflows and create a more seamless process.
4. Managing vaccine supply chain disruptions — Uncertainty about vaccination supply chains and unexpected interruptions due to weather-related events, manufacturing problems, and poor distribution planning have led to last-minute cancellations of vaccine appointments.
Solution: Having the ability to message cohorts of patients as soon as possible with changes in appointments and having automated workflows to reschedule appointments is a critical capability to prevent confusion and frustration, and to keep vaccination clinic throughput as high as possible.
5. Symptom triage management — as increasing numbers of patients receive vaccinations and new vaccines are coming to the market, it’s important to have a reliable mechanism to triage and monitor symptoms so any negative impacts across patients can be assessed and addressed as quickly as possible by clinicians.
Solution: Tools that allow patients to securely report symptoms in real time and enable symptom aggregation across clinic populations are important to identify and address clinical problems and ensure ongoing safety monitoring of vaccines. Doing so in an automated way is convenient for patients and minimizes call volume to clinic staff. Having easy-to-access digital systems that allow patients to report any symptoms just using their phones is essential to help facilitate this level of reporting and efficient monitoring.
How Memora Health Unblocks Vaccination Bottlenecks
At Memora Health, we’ve packaged the accessibility and convenience of text messaging into a system that guides patients through vaccination schedules, monitors their health, symptoms, and side effects, and nudges them to attend appointments, creating an end-to-end solution for local immunization campaigns and virtual care delivery.
In fact, this combination could improve adherence to vaccination regimens via automated reminders and medication education, and more accurately pinpoint both the duration of immunity and whether potential side effects are related to immunization or simply spurious.
Specifically, Memora Health offers multiple HIPAA-compliant communication channels, including SMS, email, and IVR, as well as 109 different language options and automated digital workflows. Memora works with clinical teams to customize the patient experience and is able to adjust outreach in real time as unexpected vaccine supply disruptions or other events impact the vaccination clinic. Patients are not required to download apps and can receive information, FAQs, reminders, and scheduling support directly through their preferred channel. Memora is able to implement and launch comprehensive vaccine triage, scheduling, and messaging workflows in 48 hours with greater than 74% engagement, 92% adoption, and 30% call deflection for staff.
A Case Study in Managing Vaccine Disruptions: CHAS Health’s Successful Response
CHAS Health, a large Federally Qualified Health Center in Washington with 20 clinics and urgent care centers has been on the frontline administering COVID-19 tests and vaccines. As thousands of vulnerable patients had to be managed for vaccine appointments, CHAS turned to Memora Health to support real-time patient communication. Specifically, Memora sends awareness and availability messages to CHAS patients and communities, connecting them directly to the CHAS vaccine scheduler where patients can make and confirm appointments. Memora’s intervention directly impacted the number of total vaccinations delivered and provided a modernized, simple patient experience in less than 24 hours.
Memora’s messaging capabilities became critical when CHAS’ vaccine supply chain broke down. Memora was able to send customized messages to over 30,000 patients to help manage the impact of the vaccine disruption, rescheduling, and awareness of open slots. If CHAS had relied on traditional phone outreach or manual messaging, their communication scope and turnaround time would have fallen short, resulting in significant backlogs in vaccinations.
In February, Memora facilitated over 50,000 outbound messages and communication outreach points to CHAS patients about their vaccine appointments and follow-ups. Memora has also helped CHAS manage over 10,000 inbound messages with appropriate triage and patient pathways that allowed patients to get immediate answers. The messaging pathways have been a clear efficiency driver for CHAS and have created a much more seamless way for patients to receive information about their vaccinations.
Preparing for Growing Vaccination Complexity
As we move through the spring and summer of 2021, vaccination eligibility will continue to expand to younger and healthier patients. The vaccine supply will increase, both in quantity and in the number of approved vaccines, leading to more complicated administrative, scheduling, and follow-up protocols. Having a comprehensive platform for vaccine management that is specifically designed to address the aforementioned bottlenecks is the single most critical milestone for health systems to significantly drive up volume again. Clinicians can leverage these tools to reduce administrative tasks and focus on delivering care to their patients. As our collective goal continues to focus on giving more vaccinations to overcome the pandemic, manage the transition to normalcy for physicians and patients, and empower patients to access care, it is critical for organizations to invest in digital health tools that will simplify the ability to vaccinate patients and deliver care.
Memora Health is on a mission to modernize care delivery by using technology that puts patients first, empowers clinicians, and accelerates the transition to a value-based healthcare system. Reach out to our team at info@memorahealth.com to learn more about how we can support your COVID-19 vaccination efforts and help you scale patient-centered communication very quickly and effectively.
Memora Health is building the operating system for care delivery that implements intelligent, streamlined workflows and revolutionizes the patient experience outside the care setting. We offer a smart end-to-end platform that unifies fragmented health care data to enable providers, payors, and life science companies to automate care delivery operations — from patient communication to documentation to reimbursement. We uniquely use artificial intelligence to digitize existing care delivery workflows, giving clinicians infrastructure that learns from every encounter they have. Memora supports a full suite of virtual care systems from automated patient intake and scheduling to remote monitoring and care pathways to billing and documentation. Memora is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Kevin Durant, Martin Ventures, and several healthcare strategic groups.
