To effectively reach and engage patients, healthcare organizations must take their habits and preferences into account. And in a more socially connected culture than ever before, these preferences are directly aligning with an upswing in text message communication.
One recent survey found that 98% of patients prefer to receive text messages over phone calls, and the number of texts sent per day seems to increase for each generation. Cell phone users aged 18-24 send an impressive 4,000 text messages per month.
So, how can healthcare organizations take advantage of this trend? And is it worth investing in long-term? In this guide, we’ll answer these questions and explore how your organization can use SMS messaging to effectively engage its diverse patient communities. Let’s begin.
Communicating personal health information requires timeliness and direct language. That’s why the immediacy and accessibility of text messaging make it a near unbeatable patient outreach and engagement tool. Not to mention, text messages have the highest open rates compared to any other form of communication (98%), so providers can feel more confident that their messages are getting through.
Some other factors that speak to the engagement benefits of text message outreach include:
Because of these features, healthcare organizations are leaning into the power of text outreach to promote comprehensive, value-based care.
By implementing automation techniques as part of their marketing strategies, healthcare organizations can send out a variety of communications to efficiently connect with their patients. These include sharing information related to:
More personalized, real-life examples of text message engagement could look like reminding a diabetic patient to check blood sugar levels or prompting an at-risk patient to schedule a preventative screening. These quick reminders can greatly improve health quality by nudging patients to take the next step in self-care management.
A common hesitation related to patient text message outreach is in regards to compliance and privacy concerns. Specifically, healthcare organizations must adhere to The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), as the Telephone Consumer Privacy Act (TCPA) does not apply to appointment confirmations, lab results, reminders, or pre or post-operative instructions.
HIPAA exists to prevent disclosure of sensitive health information without patient knowledge or consent. This relates to a patient’s protected health information (PHI), sometimes referred to as e-PHI in electronic formats.
To access the engagement benefits of text outreach while ensuring your texts are HIPAA-complaint, follow these best practices:
Once you receive consent, you need to also consider if the patient would like someone else to receive text messages on their behalf. If this is the case, you must secure explicit permission from the patient and the contact.
Once your organization starts sending patient text message outreach, you’ll need to know how to measure its effectiveness so you can adjust your strategy and maximize engagement. To give you an idea of what this could look like, here’s a framework you can use to track patient response rates:
You can go one step further by leveraging data analytics tools to conduct a deep dive into your patient population response rates to discover which messages hit the mark and finalize outreach strategies based on pre-defined populations. For example, features such as sentiment analysis and natural language processing capabilities can help you pinpoint which texts are the most effective at a glance.
Immediate patient engagement is helpful, but to lead to enhanced patient retention and healthier habits, it's best to consider outreach in terms of long-term engagement. This means healthcare organizations should structure their text message outreach campaigns in a timely manner that generates the highest ROI.
As an example, Arcadia’s year-round engagement strategy provides this approach:
By mapping out how many campaigns you plan to run ahead of time, your organization can conduct timely outreach. Campaigns to consider aligning with your calendar could include year-round, preventative, chronic condition management, and general public health campaigns. This way, you’re not bombarding recipients. Instead, you can take advantage of a data-backed cadence.
As with most industries, engagement and text message outreach go hand in hand. Healthcare organizations can utilize messaging as a way to build their patient relationships and inspire improved health outcomes.