Page 24 - HME Business, October 2018

Empowering Care with Patient Engagement
The trend in healthcare over the last five to ten years has been decreasing reimbursement rates, leaving HME providers scrambling to find a way to do more with less. Today, providers who automate touch points with their patients will find themselves on a far better path to efficiency. We talked to Brightree’s Vice President of Product Management Steve Rogers, who is an expert on product strategy in the technology sector. Hear his thoughts on why paying attention to patient engagement can ensure you’re doing what you need to do to take care of patients and to get paid.
Steve Rogers
Vice President of Product Management
introduced in the market related to physicians and patient engagement. But Brightree is taking the lead in introducing a patient engagement app that targets patients in the HME market with conveniences like payments, scheduling and communication. Patient Hub is an app we’ve developed that greatly expands a provider’s reach without having to build it themselves. It’s for their patients and allows them to engage with these patients.
And while this is the first time Brightree has developed a patient-facing solution, it’s another example of our position as an industry innovator. We already had great success with our GetPAID app that won product of the year and was very well received by the industry, and we’re building on our forward- thinking approach in coming to market with Patient Hub. This is us leading.
Q: What are the key features you’ve addressed with Patient Hub?
Steve: It’s a HIPAA compliant, secure platform for providers to communicate with patients. Lots of apps use SMS but that’s not HIPAA compliant. All our messages are encrypted and nothing is stored on the phone. Every time a patient logs in, it pulls down the message history and all the information is displayed in real time. But as soon as they log out, none of that is stored in the phone.
Patient Hub automates simple repetitive processes like insurance card uploads and demographic updates, order status and push notifications. And patients can initiate and complete tasks themselves like scheduling, sleep resupply ordering and paying copays upfront. This new patient app
is the easiest and most automated way to connect to your patients because it consolidates all patient interactions into one platform, reducing provider resources all while increasing engagement ease and automation.
And we’re switching from phones to a different means of engagement that doesn’t cut the provider out. The solution allows our customers to engage with their patients on a new,
Q: What’s happened in the HME industry that makes patient engagement so crucial today?
Steve: There are two factors: scalability and loyalty. For
the scalability factor, as HMEs expand their business they need a way to do so without expanding their workforce. Everybody is trying to do more with less. For the loyalty factor, if I’m in touch with my patients more frequently and always keeping them informed, I’ve solidified the relationship and now there’s a tether between my company and the patient. Patients are less apt to want to go somewhere else to get the supplies they need. This will especially become important beginning January 1 with the new competitive bid rules when anybody can go after your patients. So communication and engagement with patients is key.
Q: How does engagement extend to helping providers compete against competitors like Amazon?
Steve: From a technology standpoint, we give our customers everything they need in terms of automation to run their business efficiently so they confidently compete against companies like Amazon. But we’re not only providing the foundation of automated technology to compete. Now we have a patient engagement app that let’s providers take it one step further. The most successful providers will use patient engagement to personalize the patient experience, which the Amazons of the world simply can’t deliver.
Q: What tools are coming to market to elevate engagement?
Steve: As we all know, apps are everywhere so there are several healthcare-related apps that have been