The statistics are unavoidable–the United States faces a healthcare talent shortage of up to 124,000 physicians by 2034 according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. According to a recent Definitive Healthcare report, since 2020, one in five healthcare workers have quit their jobs, suggesting “up to 47% of healthcare workers plan to leave their positions by 2025.”
Recently, the Luma Health team met with Dr. Dan Vicencio, interim Chief Medical Officer and practicing physician at Near North Health, to learn more about how the Chicago-area FQHC system is navigating the current healthcare staffing shortage while maintaining mission-critical care.
Luma Health: Near North has a mission to provide “culturally competent care.” What does that look like in practice?
Dr. Dan Vicencio: To provide culturally competent care, we have a diverse staff, because it is important to have our care team and staff represent the community we serve. Second thing is to have information in multiple languages wherever possible. We have well over fifteen languages that we speak in the course of a given day with patients across Chicago – everything from Polish on the West Side, to Spanish, which is all over the city, to West African languages here in the South Side.
LH: The state of Illinois’ official COVID-19 public health emergency status is officially ending next month, May 2023. What challenges are you facing post-pandemic?
DV: We are looking at getting a lot of our patients back into care. COVID-19 really disconnected us from our patients, and so we’re using many different avenues to get patients back into a system of care that they can trust and access readily. We find that a lot of our patients have been using telephones as their main mode of information. Letters are a thing of the past now.
Luma Health is one of the things that we’ve been using to get them back into care. The ability to reach all our patients on their phones is increasingly more important.
LH: How have post-pandemic staffing shortages impacted Near North?
DV: A good number of providers did not return to medicine after COVID because of burnout or not being in a place where they felt comfortable applying their trade as a healer.
We as a healthcare system must find avenues to provide providers and staff with the time to just do what they do best, which is evaluate, diagnose, and treat patients.
We are trying to create that environment to better support providers and staff.
LH: Does Luma help create that environment?
DV: Luma definitely helps address some of the staffing shortages that we’ve experienced. Not only does it help cut down on the amount of calls that go to our call center, but our patients now have access to reschedule and cancel those appointments any time of day. So instead of calling us after hours and getting a call center, they actually can get a text and a link from us to schedule.
In the old days, we would’ve had one person making phone call after phone call to reach patients. Now, Luma can reach out to a whole group of patients and give them the same message. And that consistent messaging is key, especially for attribution lists or gaps in care follow-ups. You don’t have that potential off-script variation in message that you would get with a person making manual calls.
Luma makes it as simple as possible to get our points across. The provider has another avenue to automatically reach the patient with important reminders like, “Hey, you need to come back for your three month checkup,” or “You need to make sure that you get your appropriate preventive care screenings.”
LH: What’s another Luma solution that has helped make life easier for your staff?
DV: Broadcast! This is Chicago. We get a foot of snow sometimes. With Luma, we can immediately reach out to staff and patients with weather closure information to keep everyone safe.
Federally qualified health centers, or FQHCs, make up a core part of the United States’ healthcare landscape, as more than 1,400 currently provide care.
While these organizations serve different regions and patient populations, they all have one thing in common – the need to reach patients quickly and efficiently, no matter where they are in their journey, what language they speak, or what communication channel they prefer.
To consistently reach more patients and keep those patients healthier, FQHCs are automating their outreach and removing the burden of manual calls from their staff.
Here’s how FQHCs use Luma to amplify their reach:
At Cook County Health, a Chicago-based FQHC serving the second-largest county in the United States, the team needed a consistent method to reach their vast patient population. Since partnering with Luma, CCH has sent over 4.9 million appointment reminders to bring patients in for important vaccinations. “We need a partner that can handle whatever we throw their way. Luma always delivers – whether that’s deep scheduling integrating into Cerner, scalable vaccine operations, patient outreach, or flexible messaging capabilities,” Adam Weber, Executive Director of Operations and Support Services
As the only health center in a 20-mile radius, Alexander Valley Healthcare in Cloverdale, California often has a lengthy attribution list to nurture. Before, referred patients could miss out on preventive screenings or other needed care. With Luma, AVH automated their attribution list outreach, reminding new patients of due care and helping them schedule. Alexander Valley Health scheduled 30% more preventive screenings, with 38% more attributed patients receiving care.
For Ryan Health, which serves patients throughout Manhattan, multilingual messaging has helped amplify communication across their diverse patient population. Using Luma, Ryan Health reaches patients in over 35 different languages.“Luma helps us extend our reach to our neighbors and serve even more people,” said Sam Bartels, executive director of Ryan Health’s mobile, West 97th Street, and Wadsworth locations.
Virginia’s GPW Health Center needed a more efficient way of managing patient communication. Their team was overwhelmed with manual processes, such as calling patients back to reschedule appointments and sending paper mailers to reach patients with details like referrals or test results. Switching to patient self-scheduling and automated reminders significantly reduced the volume of inbound calls and the need for a dedicated team to confirm appointments. Patient engagement has increased by 70%, while no-show appointments decreased by 11%.
This articlewas originally published in the October 2021 edition of the Northwest Primary Care Association’s Northwest Pulse newsletter.
Federally qualified health centers, or FQHCs, are critical to keeping communities across the United States healthy, especially those with significant underserved populations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, their role has become even more important, as many patients postpone or struggle to access routine healthcare needs.
At the Anchorage Neighborhood Health Center (ANHC) in Anchorage, Alaska, proactively reaching patients who might not have the resources to get to a healthcare provider is a priority. ANHC is committed to providing a variety of healthcare services to all patients, regardless of ability to pay, and even provides a shuttle service to help people get to the clinic.
With limited staff, however, it’s difficult to find time to call each patient with an appointment for the day, and even harder to call each patient who might need a reminder to schedule their mammogram or a check-in for their chronic conditions. Staff have also been hard at work continuing to coordinate COVID-19 vaccinations and testing for the community.
Automated outreach, integrated with ANHC’s EHR and population health management system, allows ANHC to extend the reach of their staff, helping them connect with patients more often.
“Last year we cared for 11,000 patients, and many of them are covered through Medicare or Medicaid,” said Jason Korlaske, ANHC’s Director of Practice Management. “They might have challenges with transportation to appointments – for example, we treat quite a few elderly patients.”
Historically, to make sure patients were getting in for their appointments, ANHC staff would call each patient to confirm their upcoming appointment or to offer them an earlier option for patients who were on a cancelation waitlist – a significant time commitment. Now, ANHC integrates Luma Health’s patient engagement platform with its EHR to help automate this outreach. Patients can be automatically texted when an appointment spot frees up and accept that appointment through their phones, without any phone calls. Korlaske said that on a given day, patients accept about 40% of appointments offered through the Luma waitlist – which means they see a provider sooner and ANHC has fewer unused times on the schedule.
A similar approach has helped ANHC’s staff provide COVID-19 vaccinations.
“We used text message broadcasts to reach all of our eligible patients at once,” said Korlaske. “Information from patient records in the EHR helped us determine who still needed a vaccine, and we were able to send vaccine screening forms and check-in details digitally.”
If patients weren’t able to make it on the day of their vaccination appointments, ANHC staff contacted patients on the waitlist using the same automated text message workflow that they use for routine appointment offers. Korlaske said that elderly patients in particular were thrilled to receive an appointment, and ANHC even set up a no-contact check-in process to manage the flow of patients arriving for vaccinations.
“We vaccinated more than 4,000 people, which was a big deal for us because we didn’t interrupt or slow down our regular business operations,” he said.
The next step for ANHC is to expand their automated outreach to include critical population health reminders. Making sure patients get regular preventive care, such as cancer screenings and wellness visits, is especially important to the organization, as many community members have delayed these critical preventive measures due to the pandemic. While ANHC was able to adapt and provide many services digitally, such as behavioral health visits, providers are now ramping their on-site schedules back up to regular levels and encouraging patients to come in for care.
ANHC is actively working on automation for proactive preventive care outreach so that staff are able to focus on the needs of the patients in front of them. To accomplish this, they have been working to connect several of their critical patient tools behind the scenes. By building on their existing success with Luma Health messaging and connecting it with their population health management solution, Azara DRVS, the ANHC team has seen enormous potential to expand the positive impacts for their patients.
Azara Patient Outreach (APO) programs available through Azara DRVS integrate with the Luma Health patient engagement platform, and both technologies integrate with ANHC’s EHR. As a result, ANHC staff will be able to report on patients who are overdue for preventive care using data from Azara, then send a Luma Health text message broadcast with one click. ANHC plans to start with a mammogram outreach campaign in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Through text messages, ANHC will provide patients with educational material on the importance of routine mammograms to prevent breast cancer. Patients will be able to schedule their mammograms via text, too.
“One of the things I’m very proud of is we take everything very seriously, and every partner we work with recognizes that,” Korlaske said. “We’re so adept at change now, because of the pandemic, and we really push toward finding more efficiencies by doing things by text or the web instead of old-school phone calls. We don’t sit still – we just have to keep going.”
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