2022 has been full of opportunity and growth as we expand and enhance Clearstep’s product solutions. The feedback we receive from our customers, partners and end-users is invaluable. We are listening and made several meaningful improvements to our solutions to reinforce our commitment to helping more patients access the correct care at the right time and empower customers to operate more efficiently while achieving the goals they set when adopting our technology. More than 200 product enhancements were made this year…read on to find out which ones we are most excited about!
1A. Solving today’s challenge of Speciality Care Routing
Clearstep understands that deciphering the correct next step for care and the best provider type to treat a condition can be complicated. With so many options, it's often difficult for a patient to determine if they need a specialist and which specialist to select when looking at an online scheduling portal. Our mission is to get patient consumers to the correct level of care on their first try and provide a superior experience. To solve this issue, we’ve rolled out several specialist workflows that identify, qualify, and route users to a specialist if they meet the required prerequisites. Learn more about our approach here and keep reading below to discover the financial benefits of opening up routing for Specialists.
1B. Increasing Booked Appointment Revenue by 50% through Specialist Care Routing
As previously mentioned, we introduced a feature that triages users to specialist care, provided they meet the required criteria for seeing a specialty practitioner (i.e. have received a referral or have taken required tests, etc.). This new specialist workflow went live in October 2022. Our customers have seen triage conversation completion rates, CTA engagement, and appointment booking revenue trending upwards within two months.
Since introducing the specialist care routing workflow, patient consumers have completed conversations at rates of approximately 75% (15% higher than customers without specialist care routing enabled). Additionally, users that receive a specialist triage engage with a CTA (book appointment) at rates of ~85%, which is 70% higher than non-specialist triaged users. These factors combine to result in increased booked appointment revenue of ~50% due to the ability to schedule with specialists directly and guide the right patients to specialists when clinically relevant. We analyzed the ROI of enabling specialist routing and found that we see 2-3x returns solely by enabling this workflow.
2. Level Up Non-Clinical Call Center Agents to Accurately Triage Patients with Clearstep’s Call Center Support Solution
Workforce supply issues, especially for clinical professionals, continue to make it difficult for healthcare organizations to staff to the levels needed to deliver superior care. With surveys showing that up to 47% of healthcare workers plan to leave the profession by 2025, the challenge will compound to the point where organizations need to drastically shift their resources to provide adequate levels of care. Allowing providers, such as nurses, to practice at the top of their licenses by removing administrative tasks like taking calls and directing patients to the appropriate care can mitigate many of the challenges and risks of workforce shortages. Clearstep’s Call Center Support Solution equips non-clinical call center staff with the confidence and accuracy to correctly triage incoming patient calls to the correct level of care. Read more.
3. Equip Care Teams with “Executive Summary” Notes for Upcoming Patient Appointments
As providers continue to be asked to take on more and more patients, it's important for them to be equipped with the details and tools necessary to optimize their time so they can continue to prioritize the patient-provider relationship. To facilitate these interactions, we improved the feature to push summary notes of patient interactions into the hospital’s EMR to dynamically rank the most pertinent characteristics collected during a conversation and deliver them to their provider for their visit. By doing so, we can streamline the time physicians spend in the EMR deciphering the most significant information for that visit. Read more about how this feature can help improve physician-patient relationships.
4. Natural Language Processor (NLP) Version 2.0
The core of Clearstep’s healthcare AI chat solution is powered by the ability to correctly identify and triage a patient based on their free text entry at the beginning of every conversation. Our Natural Language Processor (NLP) comprehends and translates what a patient describes into actionable, clinically relevant symptoms. This year we recalibrated our NLP to recognize 45% more unique symptoms. At this point, Clearstep’s NLP engine can process more than 420 unique symptoms in a patient’s own words. Clearstep's NLP successfully interprets more than 95% of all incoming searches. Patients continue to endorse their satisfaction with using Clearstep to navigate their needs, with more than 70% of them giving Clearstep an 8, 9, or 10 Net Promoter Score (NPS), on a scale of 10.
5. Symptom Description Assistance
Understanding that no symptom presents itself uniformly across patient populations, we introduced image examples for specific protocols, if a user needs help describing their symptoms (e.g., images showing variations of a specific type of rashes). This feature opened the door to not only guide users to describe their symptoms more accurately but also expand reach and access to more patient consumers by letting them use visuals to describe their symptoms when language may be a barrier.
Interested in learning more about any of the above product enhancements? Connect with our team today!
