Health systems have found mixed results with products that aim to get patients to their appointments.
Patient no-shows are a costly, intractable headache for healthcare providers. Millions of patients cancel, skip or reschedule appointments with their clinicians every year, creating vacant schedules and expenses that can cost the industry by one estimate $150 billion annually.
Faced with such high cost, providers and payers alike have increasingly looked to tech for answers. Stakeholders across the industry — from insurers and providers to EHR companies — are engaging directly with Uber and Lyft following the companies’ high-profile entrances into the market.
Trouble getting to a provider, however, is just one of many factors fueling missed appointments. Other issues patients cite include cost of care, socioeconomic restraints, long wait times and scheduling conflicts.
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Despite big promises from tech companies, an app and a platform can’t solve all of healthcare’s woes.
“How much of this is, they’re really not that into you?” Krisda Chaiyachati, lead author of Penn Medicine’s early 2018 study of Lyft’s impact on missed appointments among Medicaid patients, told Healthcare Dive. “And how much is a true need and a gap in getting there?
That’s the question a slew of organizations are trying to figure out, from marquee ridesharing companies and non-emergency medical transportation brokers to telemedicine companies and mobile health clinics.
Here’s a snapshot of current efforts to reduce missed appointments:
Non-emergency medical transportation
The ridehailing industry’s promises won some support in findings this week from Lyft and tech company Hitch Health. The companies launched a pilot at Hennepin Healthcare’s internal medicine clinic in Minneapolis last year targeting patients who have missed appointments in the past. After a year, Lyft and Hitch found their pilot reduced no-shows by 27%.
Those results should put the wind back into the sails of industry rideshare hopefuls that may have been disheartened by the results of a Penn Medicine study published earlier this year.
That study, which looked at how complementary rideshare impacted missed appointment rates among Medicaid patients in west Philadelphia, demanded industry attention for its findings: Chaiyachati and his team found that the service “really didn’t make a dent” in no-show rates.
Chaiyachati, who said the study was done in part because of the hype around ridesharing, told Healthcare Dive he found the results surprising. Given the fact that anywhere from 35-50% of Medicaid patients in that area miss appointments on a daily basis, he said, “How do we advance their care plans at the end of the day?”
Date: July 30, 2018
Source: HealthcareDive