Community Health Network Sees Message Deliverability Rates of 98%

Background

Community Health Network, a non-profit health system with more than 200 sites of care and affiliates throughout central Indiana, implemented CipherHealth’s EHR Activation Gateway on Sept 7, 2021 to address blocked EHR messages to patients, which a top competitor of Cipher could not address. CipherHealth fixed Community Health Network’s message blockage issues and demonstrated they could deliver more messages than the competitor.

Challenge

Community Health Network approached CipherHealth with a business problem: the inconsistent quality of their current healthcare communications was resulting in thousands of patients missing critical updates. Many patients were calling into the health system complaining they didn’t receive a text with the information they needed. Over time, this could lead to a loss of patient confidence as they were not receiving timely and relevant messages related to their care.

5.7% of Community Health Network’s messages tied to EPIC and automated out of the EHR were being blocked and not reaching patients — specifically, 25,000 messages per month out of 435,000 attempted messages, the total monthly SMS traffic.

These one-directional messages are varied in type and configurable by each health system. They include MyChart Activation Codes, Multi-Factor Authentication Codes, Video Visit links, eCheck-in Reminders, Operating Room Status (OpTime) — which allows family members to receive automated updates about their loved ones progress in surgery — and many more.

CipherHealth’s competitor was not providing informative reporting to Community Health Network as to why this might have been happening. Moreover, there was only a shared phone number for all customers, instead of a dedicated phone number for each customer, which was a hindrance to getting timely support.

Goal

Community Health Network sought to address and correct undelivered messages to their patients. Additionally, they wanted detailed reporting as to why these issues might be occurring. By implementing CipherHealth’s EHR Activation Gateway, they could improve message deliverability rates, enhance communication management and gain better insight into any issues that might arise.

Impact

Between September 2021 and March 2022, Community Health Network successfully sent 3.91M text messages, with a delivery rate of 98%. In the small case of some remaining blocked messages, a breakdown for why they were undelivered was spelled out for the team at Community Health Network — because of an unreachable destination handset, or because the phone number was, in fact, a landline, or the phone number was now invalid. Importantly, CipherHealth’s product team made architectural decisions that prevented cell phone carriers from filtering out patient’s numbers. In a side by side comparison of the months of February 2021 versus February 2022, the competitor’s product filtered out and blocked 24,997 patient messages, whereas CiperHealth’s product blocked only two.

Conclusion

CipherHealth’s EHR Activation Gateway closed key patient communication and data gaps by improving message deliverability rates at Community Health Network, more so than one of their top competitors, who was unable to troubleshoot or clearly communicate why the problems were occurring in the first place.

About EHR Activation Gateway

CipherHealth’s EHR Activation Gateway closes key patient communication and data gaps by improving message deliverability rates, driving patient portal activations, reducing appointment no-shows, improving workflows and allowing for vendor consolidation. Through a direct integration with Epic, the solution allows healthcare organizations to send messages originating in the EHR directly to patients without the need for extensive multi-vendor IT infrastructure.