3 Ways to Improve Post-Treatment Compliance

According to a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, patients tend to immediately forget 40-80% of information their care providers present to them—or, worse, remember incorrect information about care plans or follow-up care.¹  In the era of value-based care, it’s important to find a way to ensure patient compliance with treatments to improve patient outcomes and avoid costly readmissions.

Engaging patients with messages and reminders sent as text messages offers healthcare professionals an opportunity to improve patient treatment compliance when, where, and how it would be most effective.

Treatment Plan Communication

Traditional approaches to care plan compliance include verbal discharge instructions and sending patients home with discharge documents and information. Digital interventions can improve compliance with care plans, including:

• Providing a digital format of care plan information that can be referred to anytime, anywhere
• Clear, action-oriented reminders of care plan instructions when and where they are needed during the recovery process. For example, if a patient is to begin an exercise regime on day 3, a reminder can be sent that morning with a link to specific instructions or videos walking patients through the exercise program.
• Provide timely guidance, tips, or exercise recommendations to support patient self-care

Handling some of this important patient information via text message can support the care plan at precisely the right time while also keeping the lines of communication open so that patients can text back or call in if they have any questions or need further information.

Automated Medication Adherence Reminders

Medication adherence requires that patients fill their prescriptions, understand directions, and take medication on time. Adherence rates for chronic conditions is about 50%, accounting for up to half of treatment failures and 25% of hospitalizations each year.² Adherence interventions strategies for medication includes directly faxing prescriptions to pharmacies and leveraging reminders and single-response survey questions (“Have you picked up your prescription from the pharmacy?”).

Text messaging doubled the odds of medication and improved overall adherence rates by 17.8%³

Although there are many digital adherence technologies (DATs) that can automate reminders for medication, it’s important to support ongoing two-way engagement with patients, who may have questions or concerns about side effects, and to have a way to send survey questions to confirm compliance.

Surveys to Improve Compliance and Reduce Readmissions

In a recent survey, Dr. Ethan Basch, M.D., M.Sc., found that nearly half the physical and psychological symptoms of his patients went unreported.⁴ Improving patient outcomes requires capturing more patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in real-time to provide timely interventions.

After discharge and periodically through recovery, you can leverage automatic procedure-specific diagnostic surveys to assess progress and ensure understanding of the treatment plan. Patient-reported outcomes can be tailored to the condition or procedure in question, assessing general health as well as data specific to symptoms, side effects, or pain levels. For the management of chronic diseases such as diabetes, our own data suggests that securely surveying key health indicators can help improve a1c rates by 0.5 points or more.

Based upon patient responses and your defined rules, PerfectServe’s patient engagement platform will alert care team members if a patient requires follow-up. Based upon the familiarity and simplicity of text messages, the solution has the proven capability to reduce readmissions by as much as 30%.

“We have such a hard time getting some patients to answer a phone call, yet they will respond to assessments delivered by text. PerfectServe saves valuable time for our nurses every day and helps us reach those in need more quickly.” — Karen Loscheider, Manager, Triage Nurse, Park Nicollet Health Services

In addition to encouraging patient reported outcomes, patient satisfaction insight surveys also help you gather and act upon feedback in time to make a difference on a patient’s overall satisfaction, which can help reduce the risk of patient leakage and improve HCAHPS scores.

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PerfectServe’s Patient Engagement solution can help you deliver a thoughtful, targeted set of prompts to support post-treatment care to reduce readmissions and improve outcomes. Our solution is proven and is live in more than 10,000 care locations, facilitating more than 42,000 patient interactions every day.

¹ Roy P C Kessels, PhD. “Patients’ memory for medical information,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 2003.

² Jennifer Kim, PharmD, BCPS, BCACP, CPP et al, “Medication Adherence: The Elephant in the Room,” US Pharmacist, 2018.

³ Thakkar J, Kurup R, Laba TL, et al. “Mobile telephone text messaging for medication adherence in chronic disease: a meta-analysis.” JAMA Intern Med. 2016

⁴ Ethan Basch, Md, MSc, et al. “Overall Survival Results of a Trial Assessing Patient-Reported Outcomes for Symptom Monitoring During Routine Cancer Treatment,” JAMA, 2017