Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Relatient CEO Michele Perry (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: We are part of the Stanford healthcare system. In there, we get all the things that you’re talking about. I’m just wondering if that’s through their Epic system. You seem to indicate that this is not part of the baseline systems that they have. 

Michele Perry: I don’t know enough about Stanford and what they’ve implemented there. I just know, in general, what we see out there. We have lots of Epic sites that have added these capabilities.

Sramana Mitra: From your point of view, you have customers who need you on top of Epic.

Michele Perry: Yes. It’s a great system but we are on the patient outreach and communication side. We’re that layer of talking to the patient.

Sramana Mitra: What trends do you see in user behavior? How well are these facilities being adopted by the patients now?

Michele Perry: We have a best practices model that’s a combination of the three modalities of phone, email, and text. We can see what’s working best. Even though text is what people respond to the most, we find that if we do just text, they don’t get as good a response. It’s a combination of all three over time that drives the best response.

We have a customer success team. They work with some of our largest customers and try different things. We have some customers who are doing telemedicine and remote appointments. That’s another piece that we’re seeing a lot of now. They want to do remote appointments before they let you come into the office.

Sramana Mitra: So you provide the telemedicine appointment setting but not the telemedicine platforms right?

Michele Perry: Yes, we are not a telemedicine provider. We communicate your telemedicine appointments out to those patients so they know how they are going to talk to you. A lot of people have these remote health centers that people are going to and doing their telemedicine from as opposed to the main office, especially if they’re specialists. We’ve seen that in some of the children’s hospitals where they have their specialists talk to a patient who’s going to go to a different office. It’s one of the appointment types that can be handled by the system. 

Sramana Mitra: Do you see a difference in patient behavior by age group?

Michele Perry: We do see some of that but we still don’t see enough difference to not use all three outreach methods. We also find that people respond to a text message with an emoji as opposed to just a confirmation. That’s what they’re used to doing. We also have people responding with questions.

Sramana Mitra: What about metrics and ROI? What do you disclose when you try to show people the impact of introducing your technology?

Michele Perry: Relatient has a communications platform. Then you add the different modules you might be interested in having. We have different metrics for each of them.

One of the interesting things we found is no two places define a no-show the same way. If you cancel that morning, is that a no-show? If you cancel that morning and that appointment still gets filled, is that a no-show? We have metrics for the various modules. On the survey, we get how many surveys were completed and how they’re being scored.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Relatient CEO Michele Perry
1 2 3