Desert Oasis Healthcare Achieves Quadruple ROI with Patient Engagement Technology in Healthcare
Desert Oasis Healthcare provides medical care and wellness services to communities in California’s Coachella Valley, as well as Riverside and San Bernardino. The group serves more than 60,000 patients.
THE PROBLEM
Desert Oasis faced a challenge that many healthcare organizations face: getting patients to follow their care plans. For doctors, it is not enough to simply tell their patients what to do and how to behave.
“There are numerous reasons why many patients do not adhere to their care plans: some do not fully understand their diagnosis, some do not want to believe they have a condition, others have behavioral health issues or simply choose not to participate,” said Brian Hodgkins, executive vice president of clinical operations and the Heritage Provider Network ACO at Desert Oasis Healthcare. He has a doctorate in pharmacy.
“It was clear that we needed an innovative turnkey solution to effectively connect with our hard-to-reach patients and ensure they were adhering to their care plans, which is essential to our goal of providing a cost-effective promote public health,” he added.
Desert Oasis had made some progress in this area, but was nowhere near an answer. As an aside, half of the 60,000 patients are seniors without much disposable income.
“As a result, many of our patients are difficult to reach and do not adhere to their medication or care plans, often leading to expensive healthcare interventions,” Hodgkins explains. “In the long term, regularly providing such care puts strain on our organization and may hinder our ability to provide quality care to our full range of patients.
“I would like to say that my team at Desert Oasis is engaged in technology testing,” he continued. “I can’t tell you how many technology, AI and remote patient monitoring companies have approached us. One of the central challenges of my current job is finding technology that we can use to truly improve the patient and caregiver experience improve the costs and burden of care.”
PROPOSAL
Health IT vendor Wellth presented data to Desert Oasis demonstrating the true efficacy of its technology and made a compelling case that patients activated on its platform would demonstrate better adherence to medications and care plans, resulting in reduced inpatient utilization and first aid, Hodgkins said.
“The fundamentals of their approach – using behavioral science and patented technology to motivate hard-to-reach members every day and create lasting engagement – were very compelling to us as a way to help our members while improving results and reducing costs lower,” he continued. . “We were extremely impressed with their data and thought their proposal was in line with our approach to keeping as many of our patients out of hospital as possible.
“The technology uses principles like loss aversion to encourage patients to take their medications and complete their daily check-ins,” he added. “By providing recurring, tangible incentives to patients, they are much more motivated to adhere to their medication.”
The premise for Hodgkins was this: even if patients were reluctant to stick to their care plans, if Desert Oasis could get them into such a simple program, they would become much more involved in their own care and the platform would be fully operational. worth the effort.
“Every time patients have medication adherence of 80% or better, their lives improve substantially and we don’t have to worry about disease progression and debilitating effects,” he noted.
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
Whether it’s addressing patients who need to monitor their blood glucose levels, have behavioral issues or need to get to the emergency room at a moment’s notice, every time Desert Oasis has turned a problem over to Wellth, the team has delivered, Hodgkins reported .
“The process of working together has been extremely simple,” he said. “We simply securely provided Wellth with our disease registry – our database of hard-to-reach patients with all their relevant conditions – and the number of patients we wanted to enroll in the program. Then they did all the heavy lifting, including patient outreach and activation on the supplier’s mobile app.
“The technology also fits seamlessly with our existing systems and workflow,” he continued. “No additional API or software integration was required. Our physicians have access to case types for our patients, allowing them to quickly identify who is using the technology and check in on their experiences.”
When the technology shows up in a patient’s case type, physicians immediately know what condition the platform is helping to treat, that the patient is most likely compliant and taking their medications, and what results they can expect from their involvement.
“Additionally, the technology alerts us when a patient is out of compliance, so we can proactively contact the patient and get them back on track,” Hodgkins said.
“Any time you transfer any part of your healthcare delivery model to a contracted partner, you want to be sure that you get accurate information from them in a timely manner and that your brand and mission are communicated consistently,” he added. “Wellth’s communication with us is direct, measured and frequent, so we are always on the same page.”
Because Desert Oasis physicians cannot be in patients’ homes 24 hours a day, the technology is an extension of the eyes and ears of the physicians in the community, and it has proven extremely helpful.
“We are currently working on finding new ways to implement it for other patient populations and expand the potential of its impact,” Hodgkins explains. “The technology has truly been a gift to us and in return we are thrilled to be able to give the technology to our patients. The platform has worked better than we could ever have expected.”
RESULTS
That platform has helped Desert Oasis close several critical gaps in quality assurance.
“Since 2022, we have enrolled 3,000 of our hard-to-reach patients – primarily seniors with multiple chronic conditions – into our program,” Hodgkins reported. “To qualify for activation on the platform, our patients must have extremely poor adherence of approximately 40% to 50%. Many of our patients with adherence in that range now take their medications 90% of the time since they’ I’ve been on the platform.
“Among the 3,000 members we’ve enrolled, we’ve seen a 91% daily engagement rate, a 91% retention rate, a 29% reduction in inpatient utilization, a 24% reduction in emergency room utilization and a 5% decrease and 6% improvement in adherence to antidepressants and RAS medications, respectively,” he continued.
The healthcare organization was able to achieve these results because the platform’s daily check-in process is both extremely simple and rewarding for patients, he added.
“Anecdotally, I have had patients call me personally to tell me how much they love using it and how proud they are of their daily check-in marks,” he reported.
“The platform promotes daily care motivation through a process where patients can benefit from both the incentives and habits they develop,” he continued. “Plus, our patients enjoy using it and consider it a real benefit, especially because its rewards directly contribute to helping our patients buy groceries, pay for transportation and pay the bills every month.”
The reduction in inpatient and emergency room use demonstrates the effectiveness of the technology in promoting preventive care, he added.
“Through their platform, patients take their medications much more regularly, improving their overall well-being and changing the trajectory of their conditions for the better,” he said. “This overall improvement in health leads to fewer emergency room visits and hospital admissions.”
ADVICE FOR OTHERS
If a healthcare organization wants to promote population health, investing in effective patient engagement technology is a no-brainer, Hodgkins said.
“Few partnerships can deliver such high returns on both costs and patient health outcomes,” he continued. “Our own investment in patient engagement technology is one of five trusted and innovative partnerships that have truly helped achieve our mission to improve population health.
“Going forward, healthcare providers will face even greater pressure to deliver better patient experiences and health outcomes, and a substantial part of that success will depend on the intelligent use of trusted technology for patient engagement and partner relationships,” he added.
The returns also clearly justify the costs for providers, he says.
“You just have to consider what will ultimately cost your organization more: a comprehensive patient engagement program or providing long-term, frequent inpatient and emergency care for a large, aging population,” he noted.
“For us, the average emergency room visit costs $3,000,” he said. “70% of those patients are admitted, which ultimately costs us about $18,000 per hospital admission. For a patient population of 3,000, an organization only needs to prevent about 30 emergency room visits to afford the full patient engagement model. Our own investment in patient engagement technology has delivered approximately 4x ROI.”
Follow Bill’s HIT coverage on LinkedIn: Bill Siwicki
Email him: bsiwicki@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.