Improving Patient Responsiveness

Background

A specialty pharmacy had a growing issue of contacting patients via traditional telephonic outreaches to coordinate specialty medication refills. Despite repeated outbound call attempts over a period of 12 months, over 60% of patients were unresponsive to telephone outreaches and therefore non-adherent to their prescribed therapy. The repeated and unsuccessful telephone call attempts also created frustration within the pharmacy patient care coordinator team with a net loss in productivity.

How we delivered

D2 digital patient engagement technology was implemented after meeting all legal, compliance and security requirements to address the issues of patient non-responses to refill requests. The engagement process was structured with the goals of improving patient responses via digital outreach, improving operational efficiencies and alleviating the stress levels exhibited by members of the patient care coordinator team.

Results

After 9 months of utilization with the D2 digital patient engagement platform, the outcomes achieved included. 

• 85% of the target patient cohort opted to enroll onto the D2 digital engagement platform.
• The patient care coordinator team stated they were “extremely satisfied” with the platform’s ease of use and the significant reduction of manual telephonic outreaches. The D2 digital engagement platform replaced over 3,000 manual telephone outreach calls.  
• 75% of enrolled patients completed their triggered digital outreach (i.e., responded) within 24 hours with the remaining responding within 1-2 days. This represented a significant improvement over the pre-existing refill processes. 
• The patient care coordinator team realized a 10% increase in productivity as refill management and scheduling activities were now automated.
• Most surprisingly, 26% of patients that were previously unresponsive to telephone outreaches, some for as long as a year,  opted to enroll onto the D2 digital patient engagement platform that resulted in medication refills.  Patients were again adherent to therapy and the pharmacy was able to re-capture lost refill revenues.