Overview
Healthcare companies from providers to payers are quickly figuring out that having the right mix of virtual care and in-clinic care can help their business in a number of ways. Many new entrants into the market, such as One Medical, focus on becoming fully verticalized providers, blending in-clinic care with virtual services. Services such as One Medical’s Messages allow patients to chat with healthcare professionals to help decide whether to see a doctor or stay home. This powerful service allows patients to make better healthcare decisions with an improved patient experience.
Unfortunately, many other providers don’t offer services like this to patients. These providers lose out on keeping their patients engaged and end up seeing patients turn to other providers and urgent care clinics that offer similar services. So while those who can afford it benefit from better service through innovation and technology, the vast majority of Americans are stuck with the same access problems that have existed for years.
But wait… there is an alternative. Healthcare providers can leverage services like Nurse-1-1 to keep up with the services being provided by One Medical, and help patients stay loyal.
Chat-first approach
Both One Medical’s Messages App and Nurse-1-1 offer text-based experiences 24/7 with an easy to use app or website. Both services allow your patients to access care wherever they are, without having to find a private place to make a call or to be presentable enough to have a video chat on camera. Text also allows members to send photos that can’t be sent over the phone or may be hard to share on a video chat.
Chat is asynchronous in its form of communication. It allows both your patients and the provider to share information after thinking about it longer than one would while on a phone call or video call. Pauses in text-based chat are expected, while pausing and thinking about an answer on a phone or video call can create an awkward silence that leaves your patients questioning the information they are being given.
Personal touch with healthcare professionals
Both One Medical’s Messages App and Nurse-1-1 connect people to a healthcare provider with secure and HIPAA-compliant websites and apps.
Allowing people to chat with a healthcare professional creates a real conversation that influences proper decision making. While bots typically end with a few recommendations for your patients, both One Medical’s Messages App and Nurse-1-1 will continue the conversation until there is reassurance and an understanding of the recommendation that is given. This requires empathy, compassion, trust, and influence that only a live, experienced healthcare professional can bring.
Increasing clinic traffic when appropriate
Both One Medical’s Messages App and Nurse-1-1 refer patients with urgent or time-sensitive medical issues to contact a physical clinic, or as One Medical states, “call your One Medical office for those.” Understanding the limitations of these services is a benefit that helps patients get the proper care they need while ensuring that these patients make the choice to visit your clinic when appropriate.
A few ways One Medical’s Messages App and Nurse-1-1 may differ in their approach
Integration with existing Urgent Care, Primary Care, and Hospital Systems
Nurse-1-1 has partnerships with urgent care clinics and primary care, and is working with hospital systems to leverage its platform. These partnership options provide patients with a choice to get the best care that is available to them. The industry trend is for payers and providers to work together to offer the proper value to patients. Nurse-1-1 recognizes this strategy and has created a platform that works with all types of health entities. Any provider who joins Nurse-1-1 is adding their services as an option for patients to utilize.
Starting with a Google Search
Patients start their journey with a Google search. Google receives more than 1 billion health questions every day. Yeah, ONE BILLION with a “B”. That is 70,000 each minute! These are your members who turn first to Google and sites like WebMD. These are searches that heavily increase anxiety. Nurse-1-1 offers a solution to intervene at this stage, and influence patients away from making irrational and expensive healthcare decisions such as visiting an emergency room when it isn’t appropriate.
You need to be where your patients are as they start their illness journeys. Being present as early as possible in this journey allows you to foster these relationships and exert the most influence in the patient decision-making process. Nurse-1-1 actively conducts local outreach campaigns to target patients who are nearby your clinic as they search for answers online. The offer to simply “chat with a nurse” for free, is a low-friction, no brainer for them. We frequently engage patients at the moment they need you the most. Our smart routing can then filter and route the appropriate patients and concerns to nurses who can help.
Price
Text-based approaches allow this level of care to scale, as it fits perfectly into most clinics’ existing workflows. Nurse-1-1’s approach to provide health information without the overhead of telemedicine services allows its offering to operate at a fraction of the price of other platforms. Nurse-1-1 is FREE to patients. The cost to urgent care clinics and PCPs is only $800 a month. This price includes unlimited chats between your staff and patients, use of Nurse-1-1’s network of over 500 nurses to answer chats, our digital outreach campaigns to target nearby patients as they search for answers, Nurse-1-1’s follow-up & engagement services, and other features discussed on our product offerings page.
We are always interested in talking to providers who say “We want what One Medical has” and want to learn more about how to grow their practices by creating true patient loyalty. If this sounds interesting, please reach out. We’d love to tell you more!
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