Rx.Health announced Thursday that it has expanded its partnership with Yale New Haven Health to provide a system-wide unified messaging platform aimed at improving care coordination and patient engagement.
The New York City-based digital health company has been working with Connecticut’s largest health system for several years, starting in its gastroenterology department. The platform has been used to engage patients digitally before colonoscopies, for example, to ensure they were prepared for the procedure, reduce canceled colonoscopies and improve patient satisfaction.
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“The reason we established this partnership with Rx.Health was really to create a unified strategy around how we engage and communicate with our patients,” said Matt Zawalich, executive director of information technology services at Yale New Haven Health, in a phone interview. “I would say currently we have a disparate set of solutions that aren’t always in alignment with one another.”
Rx.Health is enabling YNHH to manage all its communications in a centralized way through its Epic electronic health record, where the platform is embedded.
The company is a Mount Sinai spinoff and was created to help in the overall physician adoption of validated digital health tools. The platform is able to provide everything from online scheduling and surveys and screening, telehealth and mobile apps as well as two-way text messaging and chatbots to prescribing digital therapeutics.
Better coordinating messaging and digital engagement between the provider and patient is not only more efficient for the organization, it also helps reduce confusion for the patient, Zawalwich said. A patient who has multiple appointments at YNHH and is overwhelmed or confused by messages from different sources may not be prepared for a doctor’s visit and could miss an appointment, he said.
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“That is another one of the aims here is to try to resolve some of those issues that result in either cancellation or no-shows of appointments because we did not effectively communicate with the patient related to what they needed to do to be ready for their appointment,” Zawalwich said.
Rx.Health is also helping YNHH improve patient engagement around telehealth.
“We have been supporting them all through Covid as they ramped up their telehealth program. We’re supporting outreach to over 5,000 telehealth patient visits per day for them,” said Richard Strobridge, CEO of Rx.Health, in a phone interview. “They saw what we could do to use our automation capability to make their processes more efficient and more streamlined, especially as patients were really starting to learn about telehealth. And now, of course, we know telehealth is here to stay.”
Increasingly, whether providing virtual home-based care or simply engaging with patients before and after a medical visit, hospitals are expanding the use of health technology platforms to stay connected with patients and improve care coordination. Companies ranging from the digital health prescribing platform Xealth to the cloud-based software solution AdvancedMD are expanding offerings to help providers better virtually engage, educate and monitor the health of patients.
But Strobridge believes Rx.Health is optimally positioned for the next stage of digital health because it automates and unifies the experience of a digital front door for patients.
“So we’re really finally extending the reach of the institution well beyond the walls of the institution, and providing better care because of it,” he said.
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