Issues in provider communication methods may be leading to patients missing medical bills, a new survey showed.
About 45% of patients have missed or forgotten to pay medical bills because of challenges they experienced in communicating with their provider, the survey from Artera found. Another 43% of patients said that these communication issues negatively affected their health.
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Santa Barbara, California-based Artera is a software-as-a-service digital health company that helps healthcare systems with patient communications. The Trends in Patient Communications report surveyed more than 2,000 patients.
The survey also found that 59% of patients would change doctors because of bad provider communications. About 77% of respondents said that automated text exchanges with providers are valuable. However, the way providers currently offer these exchanges is too simplistic, the survey discovered. Three-fourths of patients said that most of their healthcare provider text messaging only allows for “yes” or “no” responses.
In addition, 69% of patients said they’re frustrated with not being able to have conversational text exchanges with their providers. Another two-thirds said there were times when the text messaging experience was incomplete, and a third said that they often weren’t able to achieve what they wanted. Of the latter group, 81% had to call their provider to finish their conversation.
“Patients don’t want robotic, transactional text exchanges with their healthcare providers, they want conversations. I don’t blame them,” said Meg Aranow, senior vice president and platform evangelist at Artera, in an email. “Healthcare is one of the places where we are often our most vulnerable. With that, patients are looking to healthcare providers to be human, not just in the exam room, but in other facets of the patient experience — like communications.”
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The survey also found:
- About 62% of respondents said that error messages, invalid responses or not hearing back happened half of the time
- Another 68% reported receiving repetitive messages
- About 65% said they received a string of messages that were out of order
To improve the patient experience, Aranow recommends avoiding “robotic, transactional text solutions” and documenting who is delivering communication to patients.
“Gaining visibility into the breadth of communication happening across your organization is a good first step,” Aranow said. “Consider establishing a cross-functional governance committee who could create this type of documentation and help with communications oversight. Then measure your impact and adjust as necessary.”
Photo: Tero Vesalainen, Getty Images
