Sam Hernandez, Release Manager
Health systems are leveraging digital health to educate patients and caregivers, plus help them manage pre-diabetes and quitting smoking.
Digital health covers a ton of ground, engaging patients for a myriad of concerns, including preventive care, managing chronic conditions, and establishing and maintaining healthy habits. The beauty of these tools emerges when they are integrated into existing systems and workflows, creating tighter connections between care teams and patients without substantial resources – time or financial.
The market is past the early adopter period and has entered a place where best practices have been established, so health systems without extensive resources can roll out digital health programs that engage patients without it being a major lift.
Below, we highlight how our health system clients are benefitting from digital programs addressing:
- Pre-diabetes management
- Smoking cessation
- Pediatric exercise routines
- Pediatric patient education
As 2023 progresses, expect to see more diverse examples of how hospitals and health systems of all sizes are meeting clinical and operational goals with the help of a digital health formulary.
Featured Client Stories and Outcomes
Engaging Patients in Pre-Diabetes Management
- Organization: The Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin health network
- Business Goal: Focusing on preventive care, the organization sought to encourage more patients to manage their pre-diabetes. This can include weight loss and potentially lower glucose levels for a pre-diabetic patient population.
- Project: Froedtert will now be able to enroll groups of patients identified as pre-diabetic in Omada using Xealth.
- Results: Xealth sent an invitation and reminder to more than 500 patients, encouraging them to enroll in the pre-diabetes management program with Omada. These communications have received a 58% open rate and a 9.7% click through rate. This increased engagement has translated into a 16% enrollment rate.
Encouraging Patients to Kick the Habit
- Organization: The Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin health network
- Business Goal: The organization is targeting increased smoking cessation rates leveraging technology, which leads to reduced healthcare costs for each patient.
- Project: Froedtert is using Vincere as its smoking cessation partner for covered patients who have a PCP in the Froedtert system. Xealth helps register patients in Vincere.
- Results: Froedtert will push this program live in Q1 2023 and is targeting about 100 patients annually.
Facilitating Pediatric Exercises at Home
- Organization: Advocate Aurora Health (AAH)
- Business Goal: Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, AAH’s pediatric care team would educate patients on maintaining an exercise regimen in-person as part of an outpatient clinic visit. Because of the pandemic and a larger desire for patients to learn at home and repeatedly reference the instructional content at their discretion, AAH sought to integrate and deploy the educational materials via Digital Care.
- Project: This program provides an at-home method for pediatric patients to learn about their weekly exercises for supporting weight loss and healthy activity. As part of AAH’s Whole Person Health initiative, four video content bundles are distributed to help obese and overweight pediatric patients begin and maintain an exercise regimen. Videos are integrated and deployed via Digital Care, helping patients learn at home and reference instructional content at their discretion.
- Results: Deployed in December 2022, feedback has been positive with results beginning to come in.
Team Approach to Pediatric Patient Education
- Organization: Children’s Wisconsin Â
- Business Goal: The organization desired more engaging content that is convenient for patients to access, improving the patient and family experience.Â
- Project: Children’s Wisconsin has thousands of patient education tip sheets hosted on its KidsHealth website, integrating Xealth to make this content orderable by care teams and send it to patients. Also integrated is Artera, which handles patient SMS communication while Xealth sends email communications. Children’s Wisconsin hosts additional custom education content in a third-party site called SiteCore. Xealth integrated with SiteCore to make this content orderable by providers. Patients receive an email from Xealth and potentially receive a SMS from WELL.
- Results: Children’s Wisconsin is seeing a 30%+ engagement rate with the content, far above the industry standard of around 10-15%.
Partner Community Update
Our ability to quickly onboard the vendors and apps our health system clients work with is just one of the many benefits of Xealth’s health data aggregation platform. In Q4, we set up four new partners in the Xealth ecosystem:
- Alana Healthcare – Alana’s CardioPulmonary Remote Patient Monitoring Program provides education and support for nutrition, medication management, exercise and healthy habits and is available for eligible patients and members.
- CarePassport – CarePassport’s CareMoments app allows patients to self-schedule colonoscopy appointments, in support of a customer research project
- Iris – Iris’s Advanced Care Planning product, now part of Aledade, provides eligible patients and members with support in discussing and defining their advanced directives.
- Vincere – Vincere becomes the first third-party smoking cessation vendor to integrate with Xealth. Their smoking cessation program includes a mobile app and breath sensor and is provided to eligible employees.
In addition, we continually grow existing partnerships and functionality to meet the needs of our clients and their patients. We recently expanded programs and enhanced workflows with the following:
If you have questions about our connected partners and their programs, please contact your Account Director or Paige Stocks, Director of Partnerships at paige.stocks@xealth.com.
I’ll be back in April to share our Q1 highlights, and in the meantime, check out our December 2022 and Q3 2022 blogs in this series!