Deliver Patient-Centered Healthcare with Twilio

Imagine a world where every patient feels seen, heard, and cared for in their unique health journey – a world where missed appointments, communication barriers, and impersonal care are things of the past.

This patient-centered care has become the new gold standard in healthcare. This practice has been shown to improve health outcomes, reduce healthcare delivery costs, and boost staff satisfaction.

But for many healthcare organizations, it’s not always clear how to adopt this practice. Check out the video below and read on to see how Twilio’s Engagement Platform can transform every stage of the patient journey to be truly patient-centered:

How Twilio Can Transform the Patient Experience

Twilio helps you put patients at the center of everything you do, transforming their care experience to be:

1. Accessible: Reach more patients across digital channels, including those who have been historically underserved
2. Personalized: Tailor care to each patient’s unique profile, improving health outcomes at scale
3. Seamless: Provide self-serve experiences and automation to increase patient satisfaction and drive operational efficiency
4. Trusted: Maintain end-to-end security and HIPAA eligibility to deepen trust with every interaction

Every step of the patient’s care journey – before, during, and after visits – can be transformed with Twilio for better outcomes.

Pre-Visit – Streamline scheduling and appointment management

Long hold times, high no-show rates, and the inability to easily manage appointments create a poor patient experience and lost revenue for health organizations. Missed appointments cost the healthcare system over $150 billion per year. Twilio can help make the process of scheduling and managing appointments delightful for patients while also reducing operating costs.

Self-serve appointment management

Appointment reminders are an effective way to reduce patient no-shows, and in turn ensure continuity of care. With Twilio, you can allow patients to confirm, cancel, or reschedule their appointments via a self-serve experience. Below is an example illustrating an SMS reminder sent to a patient 24 hours before an appointment:

While SMS is the most common channel for appointment reminders, you also have the option to send via email or voice calls from one trusted provider. A multi-channel approach can be a good way to accommodate individual patient needs, for example, using voice calls for patients who are visually impaired.

Appointment management communications can be triggered from your existing scheduling system – Twilio’s APIs can integrate with popular EHRs like EPIC.

Streamlined scheduling

Twilio Flex can help streamline patient scheduling for your practice. It is a digital-first engagement center that connects patients and healthcare staff, enabling bookings on any channel, including voice, SMS, and web chat.

Schedulers have all essential data at their fingertips – Flex can integrate information from your existing systems like your EHR to give schedulers a single pane of glass for providing quality service.

For example, deploying scheduling via webchat enables patients to book appointments directly from your website quickly. Schedulers converse with the patient via their Flex interface and can directly book new appointments with an integrated scheduling panel from your EHR.

During Visits – Provide hybrid care with telehealth

Research from Deloitte shows that approximately 25% of clinician visits moving forward will be virtual. Leveraging a hybrid of virtual and in-person care improves convenience, access, and patient satisfaction. Create a secure telehealth solution with Twilio, customized to your organization’s specific requirements.

Convenient virtual visits

Twilio can power virtual visits for your practice. With Twilio Video, providers can consult with patients as if they were face-to-face. Twilio Video is engineered to handle telehealth video conferencing reliably and at-scale – without asking patients to download new applications.

And by combining Video with other Twilio products like SMS and our Flex contact center, you can create an end-to-end telehealth solution tailored to your organization’s unique needs. For example, you can text a link reminding the patient to join the video conference. Then, use Flex for providers to conduct and manage telehealth visits.

Verify patient identities

For additional security, you can use Twilio Verify to ensure authorized access to sensitive patient portals, including telehealth apps.

Verify allows you to trigger one-time passcodes (OTPs) via text to validate users with two-factor authentication. These passcodes can authenticate patients and providers to protect health data and prevent fraudulent activity in your telehealth apps. You can also combine OTPs with Lookup to access mobile phone identity data to increase message delivery rates and further reduce fraud.

Post-Visit – Remotely monitor patients and use AI for care management

Allowing patients and providers to continue managing health from home scales delivery of care. Twilio can support ongoing care management, monitoring patients’ health data and transmitting it to healthcare providers for assessment. Relatedly, Twilio CustomerAI can be used to assess individual patient risk and automate care management intervention.

Patient surveys for remote monitoring

Through a 1st-class integration with REDCap – an industry leading health data platform – Twilio enables you to conduct HIPAA-compliant surveys over SMS and voice. This is useful for remote patient monitoring or for academic research.

For instance, you can use Twilio and REDCap to monitor symptom progression after an in-person visit. Each day, the patient receives an SMS allowing them to start the survey, and then respond to automated questions via voice. These digital patient surveys can be a meaningful part of your hybrid care approach, improving visibility into patient health outside of your care facilities.

Identify high-risk patients with AI

What if you could take personalized healthcare one step further by harnessing the power of AI? With Twilio Segment Customer Data Platform (CDP), you can.

Informed by patient ‘golden profiles,’ Twilio’s Predictive AI can assign likelihood scores for any future health event. For instance, use predictive traits to estimate disease risk and take preventative care management actions based on these insights. These predictions are made by powerful machine learning models that analyze outcomes across your patient population to generate likelihood scores for each individual’s unique profile.  

As a specific example, imagine assigning a cancer risk score to each of your patients and targeting the top 20% with an email campaign proactively encouraging a screening.

This is just one of countless ways you can leverage Twilio’s AI capabilities to reimagine patient care, unlocking personalization and intelligence at-scale.

Partner with Twilio.org to transform your patient engagement

Twilio is your partner in delivering the future of healthcare, today. Partnering with Twilio.org empowers healthcare providers with enhanced patient engagement, seamless digital solutions, and AI-driven insights for superior patient care.

If you’re interested in learning more about any of these use cases, including getting access to getting started resources for healthcare, I encourage you to speak with your Twilio account representative or contact our sales team.

Jeff Eiden is a Director of Product for Twilio.org, helping social impact organizations scale their missions with digital engagement.