Nurse-1-1 proactively engages with a diverse population of patients with a variety of questions and concerns. Over the past few months, the number of patients coming to Nurse-1-1 has skyrocketed.
One industry question we get a lot is about who these patients are. Are they uninsured? Do they come because they don’t have a primary care provider? Why would a patient use Nurse-1-1 when they can just call their provider?
To answer this last question specifically, we added 2 simple questions that patients now answer before we connect them with a nurse: Do you have health insurance? And do you have a primary care provider?
The results from over 400 patients this weekend:
- 73% of patients coming to Nurse-1-1 have insurance
- 63% of patients have a primary care provider
So why would an insured patient with a primary care provider use Nurse-1-1? Well for one, they don’t want to play the callback game with their provider’s office. Oftentimes, the patient has already gone to the emergency room before getting a callback from whoever’s on call. Call volume is just too high this time of year, and call centers are overworked and struggle to keep up without the modernization of technologies required. In fact, we recently heard that a large health system had over 100 patients who needed to be called back at one point this weekend. Patients have no choice but to look elsewhere for help.
Seeing these results, we wanted to know more. So just last week, we launched a feature in the Boston area that further asked patients who have a primary care provider to let us know who they have and what health system they are a part of.
Just over the weekend (Saturday & Sunday) in the Boston area alone we had:
- 68 patients from Beth Israel Lahey Health
- 47 patients from a well known Boston pediatric network
- 30 patients from Atrius Health
These are some of the best institutions in the world and their patients are coming to Nurse-1-1 to answer their health questions. This makes our team very proud to be helping their call centers during this very busy season. Anytime we can help, we are here.
Unfortunately, not all of these patients had a chat with a nurse. Until more providers and health plans offer Nurse-1-1 to their patients and members, a chat with a nurse costs $12.50. Although most telemedicine platforms cost $49 a session, when health systems or insurance plans partner with Nurse-1-1, Nurse-1-1 becomes free to patients and members. Patients and members can be routed directly to nurses who work for these health systems. The conversations can also be saved directly to the patient’s health record.
We are just getting started here at Nurse-1-1. We are working closely with forward-thinking health systems and health insurance plans to engage more patients and members, providing them the help they need to make better healthcare decisions. Nationwide we are seeing similar patterns, as the map below shows a pin in each city or town where a patient has come to Nurse-1-1 in just the last few months. That’s a patient in all 50 states.
