How CareSignal, Lightbeam’s Deviceless RPM® solution, drives ROI through better patient outcomes and call answer rates with Twilio

Challenge

CareSignal needed a cost-effective way to improve patient phone call pick-up rates and achieve better health outcomes in the process.

Solution

Twilio Branded Calling displays CareSignal’s customer’s company name to call recipients, improving call pick-up rates by 6-7% in just three months.

CareSignal, Lightbeam’s Deviceless Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) solution, helps healthcare organizations and payers scale care management and reach ten times more patients. CareSignal simplifies patient communication, allowing healthcare providers to send patients text messages and phone calls from the CareSignal platform without the need for complex setup and ongoing support. Using real-time health data and AI, CareSignalkeeps patients connected while identifying critical moments for proactive care, helping its clients deliver better and more personalized service at scale. 

“While medical professionals are trying to improve the lives of their patients, they often have hundreds of patients under their care, making it difficult to reach out to all of those people and provide them quality care. As a result, many people feel disconnected from their doctors and care teams,” explains Nathan Beck, Engineering Manager at Lightbeam Health Solutions. “CareSignal is able to bridge that gap and provide patients and healthcare providers better ways to connect, so individuals can better manage their health.” 

A critical aspect of this connection is call answer rate, which directly impacts the effectiveness of CareSignal’s outreach. Higher answer rates mean more opportunities for timely interventions, improved patient outcomes, and fewer emergency room visits. CareSignal needed a way to improve patient call pick-ups to ensure that health alerts and check-ins reached patients promptly. Luckily, Twilio Branded Calling was just what the company called for.

CareSignal at a glance

For its healthcare clients, CareSignal offers 30+ condition-specific programs for chronic condition management, like behavioral health, post discharge support, and more, that consist of active and passive check-ins and resources in-between patient office visits and telehealth appointments. Once enrolled in one of these programs, a patient receives automated phone calls or text messages from CareSignal asking program-tailored questions like:

• What is your weight today?
• What is your blood pressure today?
• How has your breathing or swelling in your legs felt compared to normal?

CareSignal then displays these patient responses on a dashboard that categorizes patients by risk or triggers an alert to the care team, helping healthcare providers quickly identify patients who urgently need care so they can reach out to provide additional, personalized guidance or schedule an in-person appointment. In many cases, this proactive outreach can help prevent or greatly reduce patient emergency department visits.

For patients in good health, CareSignal can share proactive advice, historical data, and continued health check-ins to monitor their condition and keep patients engaged and empowered throughout their entire health journey. 

Engaging patients on their preferred channels

To improve program engagement, CareSignal gives patients the ability to select their communication preferences during enrollment. Not only can they select the days of the week they want to hear from CareSignal, but patients can also choose between receiving their care check-ins and resources via Twilio-powered SMS messages or phone calls.

Many patients, particularly amongst older generations, prefer receiving care check-ins via voice calls, and particularly follow up calls when they’ve been identified as a high-risk individual. “We get a lot of praise from patients like, ‘Someone actually calls me when I send in that my blood pressure is high. Wow! I didn't expect that,’” shares Nathan. 

But while patients love the ability to interact with their healthcare providers over the phone, staffing for follow-up calls has been a large financial lift for CareSignal. To prevent the need for additional  engagement specialists, Nathan and his team set out to find a way to improve call efficiency. The answer? Twilio’s Branded Calling.

Improving call pick-up rates with Twilio Branded Calling

While many patients opt-in to receive CareSignal programs over the phone, many fail to answer CareSignal calls. The primary reason? People often avoid answering calls from unknown numbers. 

That’s where Twilio’s Branded Calling feature comes into play. Twilio Branded Calling displays a business's name on the receiver's cell phone, so the recipient can know who is calling. While this is a slight change, Nathan and his team were hopeful it would improve the likelihood of the patient answering CareSignal’s call. 

“A lot of the time, we’re just cold calling people who have no idea they're going to get a call from us. Having the ability to display the familiar healthcare provider’s name is so important because it means more people answer the call,” explains Nathan. “If a patient trusts the call that they're getting, then they get on the phone that first time. We typically try three times before we give up on a patient, so branded calling helps us reach them the first time.” 

While Lightbeam has only used Branded Calling for a short while, the company has already seen significant results. In just three months: 

• Chronic condition programs jumped from a 42% call pick-up rate to 48% (14% increase) 
• Post discharge programs increased from 38% to 46% (21% increase)

CareSignal is pleased with the initial success and has plans to roll out the feature to even more clients in the near future. Together with Twilio, Lightbeam can help its healthcare customers reach and engage patients more effectively, helping improve patient health outcomes at scale in the process.