Supporting the Healthcare Consumer Incrementally
David Nichols Carewire and Perfect Serve
This week I am talking to David Nichols, the Patient and Family Communications Product Leader for PerfectServe (@PerfectServe) and former Founder and COO of Carewire. They are focused on achieving the vision of a care platform of the future and using Nudges – or as I call it Incrementalism. Carewire started out focusing on the patient’s view of healthcare and how they navigate the complexity and access education to address the ever-present problem of healthcare literacy. Ultimately they settled on Text messaging (SMS) in part because it was already in everyone’s pocket but also because the other channels are both limited with few patients giving their email address. They did look at developing a new app but given that existing healthcare system App penetration is ~7% adding another one was unlikely to succeed. But in the customer/patient data they discovered that 88% had given their phone as their mobile number and SMS text messaging has ubiquity.
In fact, I talked about this back in 2015 and the advances made in Africa: Patient engagement lessons from Africa
David Nichols Carewire and Perfect Serve
Right now the SMS text message is the last bastion of engagement where the statistics suggest about 95% of text messages are read within 5 minutes of sending/receiving – wow! Think about that for engagement. There was also the additional forced brevity (as Twitter used to do) limiting you to 140 characters
As David highlighted much of their solution is linked to summarizing and providing the right information to patients at the right time as captured in this quote that is attributed to many people
If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
Listen in to find out about the Incremental steps with SMS and how they are orchestrated and timed to be delivered when the action needs to be taken by patients. Hear how David talks about the “Tragedy of Commons” and how solutions can overcome this
Listen live at 4:00 AM, 12:00 Noon or 8:00 PM ET, Monday through Friday for the next two weeks at HealthcareNOW Radio. After that, you can listen on demand (See podcast information below.) Join the conversation on Twitter at #TheIncrementalist.
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