How Dynamic Throttling Helps Drive Predictable Patient Volume

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Dynamic throttling allows continuous outreach to keep utilization at optimal levels for a smoother, more predictable revenue stream.

Launching marketing programs in healthcare can be scary. Healthcare marketers need to know how to increase patient volume in a predictable and consistent way, to avoid peaks and valleys.

  • What if the campaign launches and all the appointments quickly fill up? The  patient experience will be horrible when they can’t find an open appointment for weeks.
  • What if so many people call that the call center is overwhelmed?
  • What if one week is fully-booked and the next is empty? That won’t work for providers.

Relying on a series of marketing campaigns can lead to a labor-intensive, start-stop marketing outreach strategy that delivers a poor experience both internally and externally. From having to manually monitor appointment inventory while a marketing campaign is actively running, to engaging with frustrated service lines and/or call centers who no longer have capacity to support the volume of inbound appointment requests, these manual workflows and processes can turn automated outreach from practical to problematic.

Ideally, patient outreach programs should deliver an amazing patient experience, fill schedules to the right level, and never overwhelm customer service. How can you create that type of outreach to increase patient volume without intense manual work?

The answer to creating both great patient and provider experiences, while maximizing appointment bookings, is to deploy always-on marketing campaigns. These campaigns will continuously reach the right patients to book appointments throughout the year, based on their needs, their response rates, and your system’s service line priorities and availability.

Challenges of Always-On Programs

While amazing, always-on campaigns can present challenges. Where do we have available appointment inventory? Which patients should we reach out to? When should we reach out to patients?

The biggest barrier for deploying successful always-on marketing campaigns  is that healthcare marketers do not have access to clinical patient data that can help them deliver the right message to the right patient. Actium Health helps marketers overcome this challenge by applying artificial intelligence (AI) to years of your patient data to predict and prioritize patient audiences for outreach.

Identifying the right patient audience is the first step. The next imperative is to make sure you are reaching out to those patients at the right time. It’s also critical to know appointment inventory for maximum conversion and a positive patient experience. An experience that leads to “no appointment availability” or a significantly long appointment lead time will not only frustrate patients, but will drive them towards your competition, who may deliver a faster, more seamless experience.

By using a system that employs dynamic throttling (aligning patient outreach to your availability), your always-on campaigns achieve not only a better patient experience and outcome, but also foster greater efficiency and productivity by not using manual workflows, which cuts down on time, resources and errors.

Benefits of Implementing Dynamic Throttling Technology

There are several benefits of leveraging capacity sensing technology, including:

  1. Intelligent throttling - Capacity sensing technology knows when to increase and decrease outreach based on conversions to maximize appointment bookings. If the system has appointment inventory, then communications will continue. As appointment inventory becomes scarce, it will slow or stop the volume of outreach.
  1. Optimized capacity utilization - Actium Health’s CENTARI provides you the flexibility to set capacity parameters around appointment inventory for optimal availability, including same-day visit slots and maximum number of appointments available. CENTARI respects same-day visit capacity, upcoming capacity, and looks at historical data before sending out communications. .  
  1. Better patient experience - Our technology optimizes and throttles outreach based on conversions to maximize patient appointment bookings. Patient-provider continuity is also factored into our algorithms for a better patient experience.
  1. Reduced administrative burden - Marketers no longer have to manually monitor appointment inventory. Campaigns no longer have to start/stop as outreach is automated based on appointment inventory.
  1. Increased marketing efficiency - Always-on campaigns with dynamic throttling will significantly increase your efficiency in activating patients to drive patient volume to your service lines. Your teams will be able to focus on more complex and sophisticated programs and campaigns that may not be suited for always-on, like new patient acquisition strategies and brand marketing programs.

Appointment Bookings
A historical trend of appointments scheduled by day used in
Actium Health's dynamic throttling technology.

Increase Patient Volume Faster Without Overbooking Appointments

Actium Health’s technology makes it safe for marketers to launch always-on marketing campaigns that quickly drive patient volume. With our purpose-built dynamic throttling technology, Actium provides healthcare marketers peace of mind knowing their message and call-to-action will deliver a great experience and successful conversion. Dynamic throttling allows marketers to sustain more stable, continuous outreach to patients that keeps your physicians at high utilization and provides a smoother, more predictable revenue stream.

Listen to this product highlight overview with Joe Schmid, chief technology officer, to learn more about Actium Health's capacity sensing technology. If you'd like to discuss how your health system can benefit from this and other CRM intelligence features, request a demo with one of our patient engagement experts.