How NYU Langone Health strengthened its digital experience for patients

Challenge

NYU Langone Health needed to find a platform that could deliver important health messages to millions of patients across individualized care journeys.

Solution

Twilio Messaging was the first step in NYU Langone Health’s digital evolution, offering the scale to reach millions of patients with critical care information, like appointment reminders. Now, they use Twilio to anticipate patient communications so they deliver above-and-beyond patient care.

The rapid shift to digital healthcare has been long approaching, and has accelerated in the last 2 years, creating complex challenges for healthcare providers. For NYU Langone Health, a premier academic medical center, it meant doubling down on the need to put patient experience first, at every stage of the healthcare journey.

According to Suresh Srinivasan, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, “We had already spent years setting out a digital infrastructure for patient experience and had been actively evaluating a scalable solution to orchestrate and deliver vital communications to patients. Twilio presented itself as a viable partner that was able to provide these services.”

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, they began testing Twilio’s Messaging product to reach millions of users with crucial care information, such as appointment reminders. Now, they’ve developed a fully integrated platform that consolidates insights from multiple systems to create contextual, meaningful engagement with patients at every stage of their unique healthcare journey.

Digital healthcare in the time of COVID-19

COVID-19 changed how people learn, receive services, and stay connected to their care teams. That meant that NYU Langone Health’s leaders and staff had to navigate formidable challenges to continue delivering quality care.

For an organization like theirs, which includes several hospitals and hundreds of ambulatory locations, the array of patient journeys varies widely. They guide people through everything from standard care, like seeing a primary care physician, to multifaceted experiences, like cancer treatment. That means their digital journeys have to be flexible and intuitive, while also accounting for issues like security, regulatory compliance, language, and more.

Building a solution to tackle all of those considerations is no easy feat. At the earliest stages of development, their experts knew the hurdles they needed to overcome, but not how a single solution would be able to address them all. According to Michael Mainiero, Senior Director, Digital Strategy and Innovation, the mindset going into the project was, “We had already developed a strong strategy to communicate with our patients, but needed a platform to build on that would allow us to scale and meet the needs of patients on different care journeys.”

Solutions built to scale

Scaling was crucial when it came to NYU Langone Health’s earliest uses of Twilio at the onset of the pandemic. “The public was panicking and trying to figure out how to get access to care,” Mainiero said. “We needed to deploy millions of messages to our patient population quickly and cost-effectively. We were able to meet this need through use of Twilio Messaging.”

But today, NYU Langone uses Twilio services for far more than simply sending messages: they’ve integrated it into their digital experience infrastructure to deploy smart, timely, and relevant communications that fit each patient’s unique needs. That can mean anything from scheduling info and reminders, to wellness messages and accessing crucial care resources. “We do not look at [Twilio] just as a vehicle to transport communications, but also as an application platform,” said Mainiero. “What we are looking to achieve with Twilio is a logic layer and transport layer that can be built to scale.”

One example of this implementation can be found in NYU Langone Health’s radiology department, whose Twilio-integrated platform auto-generates reports listing appointments and orders, keeps staff up-to-date, and uses historical data—like prior service locations—to help inform future communication sent to patients.

Sustainable digital experiences

For healthcare organizations, digital engagement is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a necessity. “Consumers today are using on-demand services like Amazon and Uber that offer convenience and cater directly to their needs. In healthcare, if you’re not delivering that kind of consumer-grade quality, you’re going to be behind the game,” said Mainiero.

With a top-of-the-line digital experience that seamlessly integrates messaging and engagement tools, NYU Langone is able to keep evolving, innovating, and ultimately doing what matters most: giving patients the best care experience possible.