Mobile health messaging company HealthCrowd unveiled results from its pilot project with Healthfirst that showed 86 percent of Medicaid recipients in Healthfirst’s member population regularly use mobile technology, making text messaging a good patient engagement platform.
The pilot found that the Medicaid population is “very similar to the general U.S. population” with its mobile habits and ownership of smartphones. That opens up great potential to engage with the patient population, the two organizations found.
“During the two and a half month duration of the pilot program, the levels at which members were engaged is best expressed by the exceedingly high response rates and equally impressive low opt-out rates, further indicating members’ willingness, even eagerness, to communicate via mobile,” they said in a release.
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Other key findings include:
- Engaging Medicaid beneficiaries is “most cost-effective via mobile.”
- Medicaid members likely have a “high interest” in participating.
- Respondents are more likely to “take desired behavior-changing action” versus those who were less responsive to mobile messaging.
- Not-for-profit Healthfirst’s mobile platform proved to be a “viable mainstream” outreach channel toward actions in a short time frame.
The findings support the need for health plans to engage Medicaid patients through mobile means, from text messaging to mobile web and email to social and interactive voice.
HealthCrowd, which provided its Dynamic Persuasion technology to support the pilot, said that for the first time, the collaboration with New York-based Healthfirst “used pertinent member data” to create personalized messages in real time. The messaging was “highly interactive” compared to one-way messaging initiatives that have been previously used by other organizations.
Efforts to interact with patients by way of mobile can go a long way toward reaching patients where they are, which in turn can help lead to more healthful behaviors that could eventually help lower healthcare costs, according to Silicon Valley-based HealthCrowd.
The results, according to a statement by CEO Neng Bing Doh, “serve as solid evidence that mobile has truly come of age.” She added that the developments can lead to “eventual systemic changes” particularly for under-served populations that might otherwise be difficult to reach.
The pilot began in 2013, after Healthfirst, a managed-care organization with more than 900,000 members across southern New York, engaged HealthCrowd to assess the viability of text messaging as an outreach channel for its population. The goal was to test and glean insights on the effectiveness of multiple outreach methods — from text to email to postcards to interactive voice response — and to see if text messaging campaigns could improve select child and maternal health using the healthcare effectiveness data and information set, which is used by 90 percent of American health plans to measure performance.
HealthCrowd is funded by the Band of Angels, Sierra Maya Ventures and others.
