Washington’s Community Health Plan Goes Digital for ‘Greatest Patient Engagement Challenge’ Ever

Jan. 26, 2021
Technology is facilitating public health outreach during an extremely critical time in the pandemic

Now that the COVID-19 vaccine is being rolled out across the country—still mostly to at-risk populations—healthcare organizations have arduous logistical challenges in front of them from the standpoint of controlling supply and distribution. But another issue—perhaps an unforeseen one—has presented itself as well. More and more market research has come out validating an unfortunate reality: many Americans are still skeptical of getting the vaccine this first go-around.

One poll’s findings that were released late last month, conducted by the de Beaumont Foundation and pollster Frank Luntz in partnership with the American Public Health Association, the National Collaborative for Health Equity, and Resolve to Save Lives, found that just 60 percent of Americans said they were either “absolutely certain” or would “probably” get the vaccine if they could now. What’s more, the data showed that the groups least likely to say they were “absolutely certain” were Americans in rural/farm communities (26 percent), Republicans age 18-49 (27 percent), Black Americans 18-49 (28 percent), and women 18-49 (29 percent).

Another recent survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that even though Hispanic adults are among the groups most impacted by the pandemic—52 percent said their household has lost a job or income since the coronavirus began spreading in the U.S., while 43 percent said they are essential workers required to work outside their home during the outbreak—there still remains a sizeable share of this population who express at least some vaccine hesitancy. Indeed, about one in four Hispanic adults said they will “probably not get it” or “definitely not get it,” according to the KFF poll. Meanwhile, Scott Gottlieb, M.D., the former FDA commissioner, told CNBC last week that the rollout of COVID vaccines in the U.S. may eventually be slowed by not enough people wanting to receive the shot. Gottlieb said that once 100-120 million people get the vaccines, “the demand is going to get soft.”

For healthcare stakeholders, the importance of getting the right messaging and education out to patients, while combatting misinformation, has never been greater. Increasingly, to ramp-up their outreach efforts, organizations are turning to digital health companies for help. One such vendor, Arcadia, which provides a population health management and healthcare intelligence platform, is aiming to help its customers reach out to millions of patients to improve engagement for vaccinations and other important preventative care. More specifically, Arcadia Analytics is providing a platform for COVID-19 vaccination education and engagement, as well as for patient stratification and targeted outreach to high-risk patients and underserved groups, including support for multiple languages. The platform includes ongoing patient tracking and communications to ensure series completion, and reporting and analytics to track vaccinations and ensure equity in vaccine administration, according to company officials.

Arcadia’s Chief Medical Officer, Rich Parker, M.D., called the vaccination education and outreach effort “the single greatest patient engagement challenge of our lives.” What’s particularly discouraging, Parker explains in a recent interview, is that despite having an incredible opportunity to use one of the most successful vaccines ever created—noting that both the Moderna and the Pfizer vaccines have a 95 percent efficacy rate, as well as a great safety record—there is still too much resistance to the concept of getting the vaccine. “So [organizations] have to be creative with their outreach, and that’s due in part to the political climate that has intersected with the public health crisis, and the public health exigency of getting everyone vaccinated,” he says.

The service is provided to Arcadia’s healthcare organization customers, which are primarily health plans in this instance. One such entity is Community Health Plan of Washington (CHPW), which is rolling out the program to its members. CHPW is Washington State's first not-for-profit health plan, and was formed to coordinate care and advocate for people who were not being served by traditional insurance companies.

The majority of the plan’s members are in Medicare and Medicaid programs, and over the last month or so, the company has been getting lots of inquiries from members about when it’s their turn to get the vaccine and where they need to go to get it, says Jennifer Polello, Community Health Plan of Washington’s senior director of quality and population health. While that interest is a good thing, one big priority for CHPW has been reaching out to underserved populations to make sure that they have enough information so that they're prompted to get the shots when it's their turn, Polello says.

Taking a step back, Community Health Plan of Washington has been using Arcadia’s platform for much of the past year to educate patients around the public health threat, offering resources, and sharing guidance around preventative care needs via text messages. Polello reports that the plan was successful in reaching its target populations; it was able to confirm that about 80 percent of those text messages were successfully delivered to and received by members. That threshold is viewed as effective considering some of the challenges involved with translating messages for different languages, for example. CHPW is hoping to surpass that 80-percent rate for messages around vaccination information, Polello notes. “We're able to reach these underserved populations that [can be] really challenging to connect with. So, just having that that foundation of being able to connect with them in the way that that makes sense to them, and is preferred by them, has enabled us to have an open line of communication for providing this necessary information as we move into vaccine education and awareness,” she says.

Research has also revealed that communicating vaccine information and recommendations via patients’ providers should lead to more improved engagement and adherence. According to a December KFF survey, 85 percent of patients trust vaccine information and recommendations their doctor or healthcare provider, while only 53 percent trust pharmaceutical companies, for comparison’s sake. Polello notes that CHPW was founded by 20 community health centers, so oftentimes the health plan will partner with a specific community health center for a specific community-based message, so that for the recipient patients, the information is coming from their trusted provider.

Speaking to the importance of leveraging data and analytics to track vaccinations and ensure equity in their administration, Parker offers that historically, if one were to ask the average internist or family practitioner how many of their patients have not gotten the flu shot, the response from the doctor might be a blank stare since he or she has no way of knowing the answer to that question. But Arcadia’s system can immediately answer that question, while also figuring out where those patients who didn’t get their shots are located, and identifying general areas with lower vaccination completion rates. "And then we can do a text outreach program, which is pretty seamless, electronic, fast, and cheap,” Parker contends. “You couldn’t do any of that in the old days. So, in other words, technology has facilitated public health outreach,” he says.

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