Month: January 2022

A Yosi Health Multi-Part Series

This is Part 2 of our new 8-part series that explores the ins-and-outs of identifying the best patient intake solutions for your healthcare practice. Not all patient intake solutions are created equal, which is why it’s important to know about different program features, functionalities, and what to look out for.  

Part 2: How Life Science is Just a Fancy Term for “Display Ads for Patients” or If six months free seems too good to be true …it is

With the increasing ease of finding medical information online, patients have become more actively your patients to read about diagnoses and possible treatment options. They also allow patients to conduct preliminary research to identify an affliction whenever they experience new, unexplained symptoms. 

In fact, almost 90 percent of patient healthcare research is now done online, a significant statistic that pharmaceutical advertisers have not ignored. 

With millions of health related searches being conducted every day, pharmaceutical advertisers and marketers now have a ready audience of consumers who are either suffering from an illness, researching a set of symptoms, or planning a treatment course to whom they can peddle their wares. For these advertisers, every online search presents an opportunity to hawk their product or service as remedy or solution.

Pharmaceutical Advertisers and Marketers

This is both good and bad.  It’s great that patients are becoming more engaged in managing their own health, but, without the guidance of a trained physician, these patients are also susceptible to believing an advertisement that may or may not benefit them. 

An ad or advertorial content may follow that patient onto their social channels, appearing in a newsfeed or sidebar, hoping the patient will click-through and learn more.  Again this is fine, but without the supervision of a physician, might lead patients to only be familiar with one option, when several might exist.

Add to this phenomenon the fact that many patient intake and similar applications have chosen to make more money by integrating their so-called “Life Science” features into their platforms. Sadly “life science” in this context are advertorials designed to ingratiate consumers with certain pharmaceutical brands, products, and services under the pretext of educating them.

As an example, a patient might make an appointment with a specialist to have their blood pressure checked. During their intake procedure, they might be shown content seemingly intent on educating them about blood pressure anomalies, but actually delivers a particular medicine or treatment advertisement.

Pharmaceutical Manufacturers

This is how it works. Pharmaceutical manufacturers look for ways to get doctors to prescribe their medications instead of their competitors. In fact, the Pharma companies keep very close tabs on which doctors are prescribing their specific products.  They want doctors writing prescriptions for their products in an extremely competitive and lucrative market. 

If the patient has any influence over their preferred medication, and they do, one of the best times to advertise is just before a patient goes to see their provider.  

Imagine if the pharmaceutical companies knew the reason you were going to see your doctor ahead of time, plus your age, your gender, where you lived, etc. In a digital world, this could give them the opportunity to place a tailored pharmaceutical advertisement on your cell phone, tablet, or computer – just before you receive care. That’s exactly what some intake platforms are doing. They take the information the patient has just entered and query it against the paying pharmaceutical advertiser’s database that use their platform. They use the patient’s data to deliver the perfect advertisement to them just prior to their visit with your practice.  

Pharma’s Role in Patient Intake Solutions

It goes without saying that the digital intake platforms that do this are making a significant amount of money off your patients’ data by selling it to pharmaceutical companies. It’s not uncommon that these pharma companies will coordinate campaigns with digital registration companies. As an example, to start, they will provide marketing lists of doctors, often specialty specific, to whom the patient registration companies should sell their platform.  Once implemented, the participating Pharma’s are getting that patient data and are paying and vying for that opportunity to get their advertisement in front of your patients at the perfect time.  If your patients are seeing pharma adds on your intake platform and you didn’t know how they were getting them, you might ask yourself why.  All of this activity falls under the moniker of “Life Sciences” and “Educational Content”.   

These pharma advertisers count on the patient’s digital engagement with the platform to fuel their ad campaigns and augment their databases. Similarly, ad tech companies use AI and big data to approach healthcare practitioners and entice them with their wares. This “life sciences” business is so lucrative and effective on influencing a patient’s preference for a particular drug that pharmaceutical companies pay a lot of money to platforms that will deliver their tailored adds to specific patients.  This is why a patient registration company that offers” educational content” on their platform might, as an example, offer six months free in order to get a clinic to use them. In this scenario your patient’s data is a pharma marketing money pit. 

Is this really the type of solicitation that should be integrated into an intake platform that’s designed to be a confidential conduit between patient and practice? Does the intrusion of third party vendors “cheapen” the patient/doctor relationship if their messages are everywhere the patient or healthcare provider turns? Will it cost you more in subscription fees to disengage with this activity on your current platform? 

Yosi Health’s Intake Solutions

At Yosi, our pre-arrival focused, highly rated, digital patient scheduling, registration, payment, communication, and reputation management solution is designed exclusively for the healthcare centers and the patients they serve. It’s important that there is a comfortable level of trust and transparency in that relationship – a value that should be delivered by the platform that brings these two groups together.  

It’s why the Yosi Health integrated solution has chosen not to accept pharmaceutical display ads or pay-for-click banners to clutter up the experience patients are seeking with their practice through our platform. Since our inception, it’s been an important differentiator that we think gives our suite of services a significant degree of integrity above the rest.

To find out more about our patient engagement platform and the values we embraced in developing it, please give us a call.

A Yosi Health Multi-Part Series

This is Part 1 of our new 8-part series that explores the ins-and-outs of identifying the best patient intake solution for your healthcare practice. Not all patient intake solutions are created equal, which is why it’s important to know about different program features, functionalities, and what to look for.

Part 1: Let’s Look at Point of Care Hardware Companies That Poorly Pivoted to Offer Virtual and or Remote Solutions

Healthcare organizations have a reputation of being slow to adopt new technologies – even when innovations are available that could vastly improve the patient experience. It took a pandemic to be the catalyst that would accelerate the modernization of healthcare practices across the globe.

Of these innovations, contactless patient-intake solutions were one of the most visible and widely rushed to market. They popped up everywhere but it’s extremely important to know that most of these solutions were quick-fixes created in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. But there was one solution that’s been available for quite some time – and had already established a proven track record of usability and reliability. And that’s Yosi Health.

Yosi Health was founded in 2015 with the primary goal of improving outcomes for both patients and staff by delivering the first, safe, remote, easy-to use contactless virtual waiting room. With a focus on maximum patient engagement, we developed and brought to market the first, pre-arrival digital solution – as our core competency – years before the pandemic.

Then 2020 came and Covid-19 struck. Crowed waiting rooms, point of care kiosks, tablets, and old fashioned clipboards presented a significant risk of spreading contagions. Providing a safe experience for patients, throughout the care continuum, became a necessity that dramatically altered the landscape.

Most, if not all, practices recognized that to retain their customers they had to quickly pivot. The goal was to move their registration process out of the waiting room. Alerted to this need, many point of care hardware companies accelerated their development of an integrated, remote intake workflow – facilitated remotely, primarily by their customers’ cell phones. The best-case scenario, their patients would now be able to complete their registration digitally – remotely and safely.

Some of the major point of care focused companies that delivered pharmaceutical marketing ads on their tablets and kiosks quickly pivoted to offer digital pre-arrival and seized the opportunity to deliver pharma marketing ads directly to the patient’s cell phone as well. It’s one thing to see a pharma advertisement on a kiosk or tablet in the waiting room – but getting a drug ad generated from a text message from a doctor on one’s own cell phone is an entirely different experience. Most patients don’t want Pharma ads appearing during or after their registration process – whether it be at point of care or remote – Pharma ads simply don’t deliver the best patient experience. This is something Yosi Health determined early on in the process and is why we don’t disrupt the patient intake experience with intrusive advertising.

Pre-Arrival Intake/Registration vs. Point of Care

There are at least four reasons pre-arrival intake trumps point-of-care registration.

1. A Better Patient Experience: Most poor reviews heaped upon health care organizations have very little to do with the quality of care the patient receives. The majority of complaints focus in on the patient experience leading up to the point where they receive care. When executed properly, an automated digital experience allows the patient to complete everything in the comfort and privacy of their own space when they have focused time before they arrive. All the paperwork is completed and there are no unpleasant surprises when they show up for their appointment.
2. Pre-Arrival Registration Leverages Contemporary Consumer Behavior: People have a sacrosanct relationship with their cell phone. They are extremely comfortable and grateful to be able to register for care on a well-designed application.
3. Time Savings for Both Patient and Practice: Because all of the paperwork and patient registration requirements are completed prior to the patient showing up there is significantly less time spent in the waiting room, and on average this digital experience affords an addition 7 minutes per patient with the provider.
4. You have one chance to make a first impression: Onboarding a patient is their first experience of any practice’s continuum. For healthcare organizations this means making your first impression, the patient intake process (and follow-up procedures) as frictionless as possible.

Core Competency – Remote vs. Point of Care.

Building a platform for a piece of dedicated hardware is very different than building an application that can operate on all of the mobile networks. At Yosi Health, our core competency has been on providing a safe, mobile, pre-arrival solution, from the start. We understand that taking advantage of the flexibility from the latest technology available our platform is designed to quickly meet the custom needs of each individual organization. Being mobile focused, our solution can expand the scope of our products and services as mobile technology evolves.

Conclusion:

For obtaining the best digital registration/engagement platform it’s important to know if the platform is built around remote engagement from its beginning or if it’s an ancillary solution quickly put together on a legacy platform. You need to evaluate how the solution enhances the patient experience and will it be able to grow as your practice and the expectations of your patients grow.

Find out how Yosi Health, the original, safe, remote, pre-arrival, patient registration/intake platform can deliver better patient and staff experience, improve your outcomes, and increase the revenue for your organization.