In a recent report, KLAS Research separated their Patient Outreach category into two new categories. The Patient Communications category groups together solutions that are primarily focused on administrative outcomes like appointment reminders and payment reminders. The Patient-driven Care Management Solutions are ones that focus on clinical outcomes and helping patients through their care journey. This separation was done based on provider and vendor feedback as well as KLAS’s own in-depth analysis of the market.
Healthcare IT Today sat down with Dan Czech, Senior Insights Director for Patient Engagement at KLAS Research to talk about these new categories, the reasoning behind the separation, and the findings in their new report: “Patient Communications Landscape for 2022”.
Why the separation?
Czech had this to say when asked about the reasons behind the separation: “We had used Patient Outreach, which was the former category name, as almost a landing space for any patient engagement solution that had some form of communication with patients. We quickly realized that Vendor A and Vendor X were very different in their approach to the market and the needs they were trying to meet.”
According to Czech, over the years, KLAS received a lot of feedback from both vendors and provider organizations about the former patient outreach category and how it wasn’t “quite hitting the mark”. So Czech and the team at KLAS looked for a way to use a data-driven approach to separating the large number of vendors in this single category by the type of work that they do.
“The primary differentiator between the two is: patient communications are often flexible communication tools that at their core are appointment reminders, broadcast messaging type tools, but can be used to deliver different types of content and different types of messages to patients,” explained Czech. “Whereas a Patient-driven Care Management Solution is a communication tool, but it’s really driven around a specific journey or pathway or template. It’s a very specific and targeted communication path.”
17 Capabilities
After consulting with provider organizations, vendors, and internal experts, KLAS identified 17 capabilities to measure solutions in BOTH categories. Those 17 were arranged into 4 broad groups:
- Clinical communication. Examples: patient/provider messaging, patient guidance/care navigation, post visit follow-ups
- Administrative communication. Examples: appointment reminders, broadcast messaging
- Financial communication. Example: payment reminders
- Other communication. Examples: patient surveys, adhoc messaging to patients
Solutions in the Patient Communications category would presumably be graded more on the measures that fall in the Administrative and Financial groups while Patient-driven Care Management Solutions more in the Clinical group.
Ranked Vendors
The report from KLAS featured 14 Patient Communication vendors: Klara, WELL Health, PatientBond, CipherHealth, Luma Health, Relatient, RevSpring, Intrado, Perfectserve, Upfront, SR Health, Millennia Patient Services, Odeza, and Vocera.
There were 5 vendors in the Patient-driven Care Management category: Get Well, Twistle, Wolters Kluwer, Wellbe, and Quil.
When asked about other popular vendors in this space that did not make the list, Czech had this to say: “We hear about a new company daily, if not more frequently. We’ve created some new entry points to being measured at KLAS – what we call an Emerging Technology Report or a Spotlight Reports for new up-and-coming vendors. If [a vendor] has a significant customer base, we can go through the standard measurement process. There are several [vendors] on our radar that just due to capacity constraints and other factors we just couldn’t get to for this research.”
Helping Providers
It will be interesting to see how these new categories will help provider organizations. There is a reasonable argument to be made that using a vendor that excelled at helping patients through a hip-replacement through educational materials for appointment reminders was ineffective. The former requires high quality customizable educational content. The latter, simple messages delivered at specific times or based on specific workflow triggers.
By separating these solutions, KLAS is perhaps helping providers to better focus on the features that are needed in each situation.
Watch the full interview with Dan Czech to learn:
- Whether the lines will blur between these categories over time
- Why augmenting EHRs is a path to communication success versus competing with them
- Why the quality of content is a differentiator for Patient-driven Care Management Solutions
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Transcript
[00:00:09] Colin Hung: Hello and welcome to Healthcare IT Today, where we explore the latest healthcare technology trends and discover valuable insights in health IT. I’m Colin Hung and joining me today is Dan Czech, Senior Insights Director for Patient Engagement with KLAS Research, Dan, welcome to the program.
[00:00:38] Dan Czech: It’s nice to be with you today Colin.
[00:00:40] Colin Hung: I’m excited because you came out with, or KLAS came out with a new Segment Insights that was focused on patient communications. I think the title of it was “Patient Communications Landscape for 2022”. There was a lot of great stuff in this report and I want to dive into it with you.
[00:00:59] Dan Czech: That sounds fun. I love to talk about this topic.
[00:01:03] Colin Hung: So first of all, right off the bat, I gotta ask you this. In this report, you actually divide what once was a single category of vendors and products into two separate categories. You now have patient communication solutions and then something you call patient driven care management solutions. Can you help us with that distinction? What’s the difference between the two?
[00:01:28] Dan Czech: This decision to split the categories, actually one of the main purposes of this report was to find a way to take a data-driven approach to separating the vendors by the type of work that they do.
[00:01:42] We were hearing both from the vendors, as well as provider organizations that had shared their perspective with KLAS, that it wasn’t quite hitting the mark. We had used patient outreach, which was the former category name, as almost a landing space for any patient engagement solution that had some form of communication with patients. We quickly realized that Vendor A and Vendor X were very different in their approach to the market and the needs they were trying to meet.
[00:02:09] So in an effort to provide clarity to provider organizations and help compare, as much as possible, similar vendors. That was our decision to split these two categories. It was really interesting the way that we went about doing this – we asked every customer of these vendors that we spoke with: what were the different use cases you used this technology for?
[00:02:33] We had a list of about 17 capabilities and we went through this list with every organization. We had some gut feel for what we thought the vendors would look like. And it was appalling when I did the analysis and started to compare the different vendors. It just popped out of the page in my spreadsheet that “these vendors” are clearly this type and “these vendors” are clearly that type. It was really easy.
[00:02:58] Then as I started to dig deeper in the analysis, it followed through. Patient Communication vendors typically saw one type of outcome, which was more administrative outcomes. And then Patient Driven Care Management Solutions typically saw clinical type outcomes like reduced readmissions or reduced length of stay.
[00:03:18] So the way we look at this, what we saw in the data, the primary differentiator between the two is: patient communications are often flexible communication tools that at their core are appointment reminders, broadcast messaging type tools, but can be used to deliver different types of content and different types of messages to patients.
[00:03:37] Whereas a Patient Driven Care Management Solution is a communication tool, but it’s really driven around a specific journey or pathway or template, whatever you’d like to call it. Let’s say for example, a total knee replacement, an organization may use one of these solutions to engage the patient prior to the procedure to prepare them, make sure that they come in ready to go and,able to get the best care, then follows them through their inpatient stay all the way post surgery into recovery and patient reported outcomes. It’s a very specific and targeted communication path. So that’s the main difference between the two.
[00:04:18] Colin Hung: I like, I like one of the distinctions you made there. Although both sets of tools and vendors play in the opposite world, what I heard was that the patient communication side is really focused on administrative outcomes. Getting you back in, payments, those kinds of things. Whereas the patient driven communication tools, what you’re saying is it’s more driven on the outcomes for that individual patient and helping them through that journey of whatever is happening with them, with their procedure or with the disease that they have, or a condition that they have and so forth.
[00:04:54] Dan Czech: That’s right.
[00:04:55] Colin Hung: Awesome.
[00:04:56] Dan Czech: What’s interesting is that many of these vendors on both sides cross both. They show a small portion of clinical outcomes if you’re a patient communications vendor, but you almost hear from every organization that’s a patient communications customer – reduce no-show rates. That’s the industry standard for these types of tools. Everybody talks about reducing their no-show rates.
[00:05:22] Colin Hung: I want go back to something you said earlier and, and it’s kind of related to no-shows. That is the main use case – appointment reminders or reminders that you need to make an appointment based on where you are in your journey or how long you’ve not seen a doctor or specialist. You came up with 17 use cases as part of in this report…were these the 17 that you knew going in that people were using it for or did you discover these as part of creating this report? There’s a lot in here, there’s wellness reminders, care gap reminders, patient surveys, payment reminders, pre-surgery education. These are all use cases that were in this report.
[00:06:07] Dan Czech: So this list was actually driven by a couple of different inputs. One was, KLAS has held multiple summits over the past couple of years, focused on patient engagement. Right before the pandemic hit, we held one late in 2019. Our goal was to refine the list of what a patient engagement solution should offer. The summit prior to that we came up with a list of 80 capabilities, not just communication capabilities, but broad patient engagement capabilities.
[00:06:41] And we targeted this group. This was a group of vendor executives, provider organization, executives. There were even patients in the room and we had surveyed patients as well. We worked through that meeting to focus the list of communication capabilities. We used that as a starting point. We refined the rest from what we had been hearing from provider organizations, as well as what vendors had both on their websites and as well as conversations that they shared with us.
[00:07:08] 17 is still a lot of capabilities, but the different and the specific types of communications are almost endless that organizations can use these tools for.
[00:07:19] Colin Hung: Companies like Klara, WELL Health, Relatient, and Solutionreach. These are all companies that are highlighted in your report. They are truly flexible. They can send messages that are more than just apointment reminders. They can include links to education and other things as well. The vendors have gone beyond the single use cases like they had when they first started years and years ago.
[00:07:44] I’m going ask you about that. Did you run into situations where the providers have multiples of these solutions? Did they have more than one of these vendors that were in your report?
[00:07:56] Dan Czech: Yeah, we did. It wasn’t common, but we did. I would say it was more common that they had a patient communications and a patient driven care management solution, because while they overlap a little bit, the use cases are pretty distinct. But there were several organizations that were using two different solutions. They may be using one for their inpatient needs and one for their ambulatory needs. Or they may have a specific department that was using one solution that the vendor had gotten in through a department lead or whatever their entry point was, but they may have one isolated use case. And also a more enterprise platform.
[00:08:35] We do see both in this space and then broader patient engagement technology, organizations are trying to get to as few vendors as possible. And you see that in vendor development and through acquisitions and development as well, where they are trying to increase the number of capabilities that they offer to an organization in an effort to gain that stronghold and really become an indispensable solution.
[00:09:05] Colin Hung: So today they’re separate categories. Do you see these vendors in both these spaces coming back together again down the road? or do you think they’re going to be separate and distinct for a long time given that the use cases are so different?
[00:09:20] Dan Czech: You know, I think that’s something we’ll have to keep an eye on over the next couple of years.
[00:09:24] I would anticipate from what we’ve seen in other patient engagement technologies, that the organizations will continue to expand their functionality and capabilities in this space. I think sometimes provider organizations in particular are a little hesitant when a vendor comes in and says: “we can do it all, we can be your solution for everything”. Sometimes that’s a bad thing. You don’t want a Jack-of-all-trades that’s a master of none.
[00:09:58] If they have a really targeted need for a specific type of communication, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of these organizations that meet that very specific need maintaining relevance.
[00:10:12] Colin Hung: Gotcha. It makes sense because you’re right, none of us want and no provide wants to implement a monolith. I think they’ve learned some hard lessons there. But also, they don’t want best of breed where you have 19 vendors that do basically the same thing. Somewhere in the middle is the magic spot. It will be interesting to track this over the next few years.
[00:10:34] Dan Czech: I think the other thing organizations will be considering – they do today and will even more in the future – how do these communication solutions augment what my EMR vendor is already doing? It’s a decision point today. Those that augment rather than compete with EMR and portal technology are gonna be the ones that stay compelling in this industry.
[00:10:57] Colin Hung: Let’s switch for a moment to talk about the patient driven communications side. There, you highlighted some companies in the report like GetWell, Twistle, and Wolters Kluwer. One of the things I noticed when reading it is all three of these companies create their own content for those specific conditions or procedures that they’re helping patients journey through. It sounds like that is a key differentiator today. Is that what you found?
[00:11:27] Dan Czech: Yes. We saw from their customer’s perspectives that while the content is there, it’s not always created equal. It doesn’t always apply to their specific care journey or pathway for the way they do business as an organization. So I think there will always be a need to customize the content that is provided.
[00:11:49] I do think that the basic content as this market matures over the next handful of years will get relatively standardized and I hate to use the word “commodity”, but it’ll be consistent across the industry. Organizations will be able to leverage best practices from other organizations that have helped refine the content and start from a much better starting place.
[00:12:14] Colin Hung: It sounds like down the road, the creation of the content may no longer be a huge differentiator, but the customization is definitely sounding like it’s going to be a requirement. For my hospital, my organization, I want my patients journey this way so I want extra content here, or I want my own content there. That was highlighted in the report – how easy or hard it was to customize that content was a big factor for a lot of the providers you spoke to.
[00:12:43] Dan Czech: Yeah. And it’s interesting, there’s a parallel to this on the patient communication side with appointment reminders. If you look back, 3, 4, 5 years ago, many organizations were choosing their own journey with how frequently do I communicate with my patients. What does that cadence look like? What do the messages look like? It’s relatively standard in the industry today. We’ve done enough studies about what is the right frequency to reach out to your patients. What should those messages look like. So that is no longer the differentiator that it used to be.
[00:13:18] I would anticipate the content for patient driven care management to be similar if you look two or three years down the road.
[00:13:26] Colin Hung: Now, of course, whenever you come out with a report like this, and this is true of any KLAS report there are companies that are looking at this list and this report and saying “Hey, how come we’re not on there?” “You forgot about so-and-so” and “what about this vendor?” What’s the message to them? How can they get on these reports or into your radar?
[00:13:47] Dan Czech: Yeah. I would say, especially with patient engagement, we probably hear about a new company on a daily basis, if not more frequently than that. We’ve actually, over the past few years, created some new entry points to being measured at KLAS – what we call an Emerging Technology Report or a Spotlight Reports for a new up-and-coming vendor. We’ll talk to early customers and share with the industry, what outcomes and successes those early customers are seeing. So that’s one entry point for an organization that wasn’t measured in this report.
[00:14:20] If they have a significant customer base, we can go through the standard measurement process and talking to their customers and including them in this category going forward. There are several on our radar that just due to capacity constraints and other factors we just couldn’t get to for this research.
[00:14:41] I would say there’s probably another few dozen communication solutions in the market today. If not more,
[00:14:49] Colin Hung: I can imagine that that the grid that you have is going to have a lot more logos on it the next iteration that you do this report
[00:14:55] Dan Czech: Yep
[00:14:58] Colin Hung: Dan, final question. Where can people go to download the report?
[00:15:01] Dan Czech: Yeah, you can go to KLASResearch.com and, and click on our report section of the website. You can also reach out to me at dan.czech@klasresearch.com and I’ll get a copy of the report to you. We love doing these reports and our mission at KLAS is to improve the delivery of healthcare in the world, by bringing transparency to how well vendors deliver for their customers.
[00:15:23] So any healthcare organization that wants access to that [report] and is using it to help make a smart purchasing decision, we want that in their hands.
[00:15:32] Colin Hung: Amazing Dan. Thank you so much for the information you shared today. It’s been a pleasure having you on the program.
[00:15:37] Dan Czech: Likewise, this was a lot of fun Colin. Thank you for inviting me.
