PatientBond – Delivering Care on Patients’ Terms
In the digital age, personalized healthcare is the aim of every healthcare provider competing against thousands of telehealth solutions. Digital patient engagement platforms and digital patient interactions are increasing to supplement in-person care, not replace it. This has led to the pressure of delivering experiences on par with the customers’ expectations seen across different industries where things happen instantly or with just a click. PatientBond imbibes the philosophy that both human and digital interactions create the physician-patient bond. For this purpose, the company is known for taking an extra mile through its platform based on consumer psychographics and digital engagement workflows. The cloud-based and API-driven patient engagement platform, PatientBond offers personalized messaging, a digital channel mix, and a patient experience based on insights of the patient’s attitudes, values, beliefs, core motivations, priorities, and communication preferences.
The platform’s psychographic segmentation model is 91.1 percent accurate in grouping five unique segments having different approaches towards health and wellness and require different engagement strategies for better outcomes. The overall purpose behind the solution is personalization and also meeting and respecting patients on their terms. “This approach has achieved significant results in a variety of applications, including hospital readmission reductions, closing care gaps, medication adherence, reducing missed appointments, growing client market share, increasing patient payments & collections, and many other uses,” says Justin Dearborn, CEO of PatientBond.
PatientBond’s psychographic segmentation model is 91.1 percent accurate in grouping five unique segments having different approaches towards health and wellness.
Consumer-centricity to Patient-centricity with Psychographics
PatientBond is the brainchild of consumer engagement technology experts who sought to improve patient engagement in healthcare by leveraging digital workflows that are similar to consumer-centric industries. After spending a brief period of time perfecting the technology, PatientBond integrated the psychographics model for amplified results. PatientBond’s psychographic model was developed by healthcare consumer experts from Procter & Gamble, who led three generations of psychographic modeling for P&G’s Healthcare division since the early 2000s. PatientBond’s combination of highly configurable, digital workflows powered by a proprietary psychographic segmentation model has been pressure-tested among hospitals, health systems, payers, urgent care providers, pharmaceutical companies, and specialty pharmacies.
It Pays to Be Data-driven
Recently, remote healthcare solutions gained traction during the COVID-19 pandemic and to understand this trend better, PatientBond engaged in nation-wide market research. The findings revealed a forward trajectory for telehealth utilization from 11 percent to over 30 percent in the U.S. for users above age 18. The results showed that two of five psychographic segments were attributed to more than 70 percent of telehealth use prior to COVID-19 and some segments are more likely to use it as we advance. “This also holds true for remote monitoring, health portal utilization, and other forms of digital engagement. Maximizing adoption of digital health means being able to identify these segments in a patient population and engaging them in a meaningful way that resonates with them and motivates desired behaviors,” explains Dearborn.
To amplify engagement with personalized communication at scale, across any platform to motivate and activate patient behaviors, the PatientBond platform takes an automated route. “Automating communications at scale means efficiently and cost-effectively reaching thousands, if not millions, of patients without spending a lot of human resource capital on outreach and follow-up,” says Dearborn. And rightly so, the users can benefit from great ROI and avoid operational expenses from manual calls that can easily exceed ten dollars per call and result in many voicemails and unanswered calls. With digital communication through PatientBond, it is just a matter of pennies and an engagement rate up to 60 percent!
Additionally, PatientBond’s proprietary psychographic segmentation model dramatically enhances patient response and behavior activation. One of the real use cases of PatientBond is with payment processes where the platform increased the number of patient payments by 4X in the first ten days. “We’ve also been able to increase collections for balances over 120 days past-due by 24 percent and reduced paper statement and postage costs by 50 percent. At scale over a large population, the impact on cash flow is enormous,” expresses Dearborn. PatientBond can serve as a standalone platform or be used to enhance healthcare providers’ existing CRM, EMR, or practice management systems as a bolt-on.
Patient Psychographics on Patient Outcomes and Behaviors
From impacting health outcomes and patient behaviors, PatientBond has readily helped clients achieve significant results in clinical applications and the closing of care gaps. Psychographic messaging has demonstrated efficiency up to 8X patient responses as opposed to traditional patient engagement models for health screening. The solution has also resulted in a thirty percent increase in primary care visits for diabetes checkups and twenty percent reductions in missed appointments. “Moreover, we can motivate patients to pursue repeat visits, extending the patient journey, for preventative care and additional services, such as physicals, flu shots, COVID testing & vaccines, and even nutritional or lifestyle modification counseling,” says Dearborn. “PatientBond has also reactivated patients who have gone extended periods without visiting a provider to get the care they need.”
Insight-driven with Insights AcceleratorTM
To stay relevant to times and close the gap for customer-centricity in healthcare, PatientBond’s ongoing market research helps enhance its solutions and informs customers with befitting strategies and marketing campaigns. Insights from the PatientBond national research on COVID vaccination attitudes will also be rolled into its latest offering called Insights AcceleratorTM. “We have hundreds of millions of consumer insights and data points from eight years of healthcare consumer research and now we are packaging it in a product called the Insights Accelerator,” says Dearborn. PatientBond’s Insights AcceleratorTM application is a virtual dashboard that allows users to access data that enable healthcare providers to choose the right messaging and marketing mix to influence healthcare consumer decisions and motivate desired outcomes. PatientBond has applied for a provisional patent on Insights AcceleratorTM and launched it with some health systems and payers. The Insights AcceleratorTM has applicability to every healthcare provider, payer, and life sciences firm. The intuitive form factor of the Insights AcceleratorTM boosts its usability on par with basic CRM applications.
The company has also closed Series C funding that will be allocated evenly for product development and go-to-market resource investment. PatientBond, with its award-winning platform, will continue supporting specialty pharmacy solution providers, and commercial and government payers. “We are essentially utilizing the core platform, which has met with great success and an eighty-two Net Promoter Score with health systems and the urgent care market, and repurposing it for the areas mentioned above,” beams Dearborn.
Many key findings from studies show that only 40 to 60 percent of Americans will receive the COVID vaccine within the first year of its launch. PatientBond plans to aid hospitals, payers, and other healthcare stakeholders that have mobilized to promote the vaccine to implement palatable methods after the first wave of vaccination. “Insights from our study will help healthcare providers understand and overcome the challenges to vaccine uptake and PatientBond will help them promote the vaccine and follow up with appointment confirmations and reminders,” says Dearborn. “This is the kind of value we bring to healthcare providers that has helped PatientBond grow rapidly and be named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies two years running and gain nation-wide recognition.”
