Alexandra Drane is the President and Co-Founder of Eliza, a patient engagement company
Somewhere around the 17th time someone hangs up on you, or tells you to mind your own business, you know whether or not you’re succeeding at engaging folks in their health.
Over the past 10 years and more than 400 million interactions, we have been both blessed and cursed by having a technology platform that gives us instantaneous feedback on the impact of our outreach. Sometimes what we learn feels soul-affirmingly wonderful and sometimes it’s more like a kick in the gut – but it’s always instructive.
In fact, our platform was designed to support a creative process that assumes that will we not always get it right – that using a data-driven “test and learn” approach will give us the best results in the short-term and the most meaningful insights long-term. This design was actually an intentional contrast to the methodology often used in healthcare communications – where having a gut feeling that something will work often drives a mailing to thousands of patients. Does anyone know anybody who ever got excited and inspired by a brochure featuring a picture of a diseased kidney?
Over the years we have become sensitive to what happens outside of the healthcare space—what most people call life.
People typically don’t sit around talking about their diabetes all day, or the importance of a colon cancer screening. So to break through the noise and actually engage individuals in their health, we as an industry need to be more beguiling than that (albeit sexy) picture of a diseased organ…
While the “how we do it” is wrapped up in 10 years of conversations, data and analytics, we employ key themes in our outreach design process that stand the test of time. Examples include:
- Be worthy of somebody’s time
- Listen to people and make them feel “heard”
- Leverage the teachable moment
- Understand and remove barriers to better health
- Communicate with people the way they live their lives – in multi-modal ways (phone, email, text messaging, mail)
- Connect with soul, authenticity, and even a bit of humor
- Create advocates for our customers’ brands – and for healthier behavior in general
When a person picks up the phone, she may have just lost her job or had her heart broken or had a colicky kid who didn’t sleep the night before. Or on the positive side, she might be madly in love or she might have just landed her dream job. Whatever it is, her health might not naturally be top of mind – at least not the way the industry tends to define “health.”
Every single interaction is designed with the assumption that something big and important happened for that person today, and (sadly for us) it might not have been related to the topic we care about. The understanding that this person is an individual, with beliefs and concerns and attitudes that are different from someone else’s – and with priorities that might not always match our own – is humbling, and a critical aspect of genuinely connecting with and inspiring people.
So what do we do about that? We analyze the data. And sometimes we learn that these differences can be attributed to factors like age or gender, which gives us an opportunity to connect more globally. For example, we’ve seen that men are more than 20% more likely to take a cost-savings approach to health than women, and that seniors are far more likely to consider their doctor their primary source of health information, compared to the media or even friends and family.
We’ve found that sometimes it’s a lack of information that’s the issue.
For example, when we reach out to people who have recently been discharged from the hospital and offer them a real-time transfer to a nurse or member services representative who can help answer outstanding questions or schedule recommended appointments, we typically see transfer rates ranging from 50% to over 75%. Subsequently, emergency room readmission rates go down.
Other times, it’s a lack of inspiration that’s the problem – so we might wrap our messaging in humor, or even in song.
Those types of messages can drive behavior too, such as inspiring 95% of women we coyly ask to schedule their recommended mammogram.
The point is to make someone feel better afterward than they did before. And not just better because the person acted on the advice we shared —such as scheduling that preventive exam or taking that next dose of medication. But also because they felt heard, understood, and respected.
Or maybe we just brightened their day a bit, maybe made them chuckle.
When we measure success, we look at the impact our outreach has on increasing health measures. But we also look at how much people value the interaction, how engaged they are, and how this translates into greater love (or at least appreciation) of their health providers and insurers. Our industry’s post-health reform prosperity will depend on the strength of these relationships and the ability to move people to their optimal health.
In the end, we are all patients, and so are our fathers and our sisters and our children and our friends. Which is why we feel that each opportunity to speak with – and more importantly listen to – people is an honor.
It’s an honor that we approach with humility, and with soul.
About Alexandra Drane
Alexandra Drane has devoted her career to inspiring people to lead healthier, happier and more engaged lives through the use of innovative technology. Alex is currently president and co-founder of Eliza Corporation, a leading provider of integrated healthcare communication strategies and one of Entrepreneur magazine’s “100 Brilliant Companies” (2009). The company’s intelligent, tailored interactions—including automated calls powered by a patented speech recognition engine, rich web and multi-modal delivery platform and proprietary sophisticated data analytics—make health and healthcare information more accessible, more actionable and more engaging.
For more information about Alex and Eliza Corp, visit www.elizacorporation.com
