Many of today’s health providers communicate with patients using an average of 11 different digital health vendors (e.g. telehealth, bill pay, appointment reminders, portal, intake, care gaps),1 resulting in a range of messages, sent at random, from different provider phone numbers, creating a confusing and frustrating patient experience. Artera, a SaaS digital health leader in patient communications, today announced Artera Harmony to solve this industry-wide pain point.
Unlike any solution currently available, Artera Harmony orchestrates patient messaging throughout an entire organization by integrating digital vendors across the health system’s ecosystem, managing communication workflows from multiple departments, and prioritizing messaging importance and timing. The result: patients receive the correct messages, at the correct time, in the correct order, from a single provider phone number, within a consistent communications thread defined by the patients’ preferred communication channel and language.
“We’ve heard time and time again from health systems that patients are being bombarded with disparate communications, creating messaging fatigue and a subpar patient experience and outcomes,” said Guillaume de Zwirek, CEO and Founder, Artera. “Artera Harmony is an open platform that integrates with the provider’s existing tech stack, suite of applications and various departments, to manage communications to the patient in an emotionally intelligent, coordinated way.”
Artera Harmony: The Next Evolution of Patient Communications
For eight years, Artera has innovated in the patient communications market, including the delivery of Call-to-Text to easily switch callers to SMS conversations (2021), ChatAssist AI, which harnesses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to automate multi-step conversations (2021), Sentiment Analysis, a sub-field of Natural Language Processing, informs care teams when a patient responds negatively during a digital conversation (2021), extended language support with 109 languages available to support preferred language and improve care equity (2022), and Self Service Analytics to deliver elevated reporting capabilities that eliminate vendor dependency when custom reports are desired (2023).
Harmony builds on this history of innovation and is the culmination of months of market validation, independent research, focus groups and listening sessions with 50+ health systems. Artera’s validation process uncovered consistent health system post-pandemic pain points following the surge in technology adoption during the previous three years, including:
- On average, large health systems work with 11+ different digital health vendors that communicate (e.g., text, IVR, etc.) independently with patients.
- Often these digital health vendors are managed by different departments within the health system, with limited-to-no awareness of competing communication workflows or messaging backlogs.
- Limited-to-no coordination of “messaging importance,” timing or cadence, resulting in communications appearing out-of-order and lacking context.
- Some patients feel “over messaged” and report message fatigue, resulting in poorer response rates from patients.
Introducing Artera Harmony
Artera Harmony addresses these industry pain points by (1) delivering increased visibility into vendor-to-patient communication cadence, content and timing across a health system’s disparate vendor solutions and (2) delivering new capabilities for health systems to unify and orchestrate patient communications holistically, and according to both their organizations’ and patients’ unique preferences.
Powered by the Artera Marketplace
Artera Harmony is designed to manage communication workflows designed within Artera or via external digital health vendors to deliver a truly integrated patient communications experience. The growing Artera Marketplace already includes 30+ digital health vendors who are utilizing Artera’s open APIs to route communications through the platform, including Arcadia, Blockit, Bright.md, Flywire, Gozio Health, RevSpring, Tonic, WebMD Ignite, and Xealth (to name a few). Artera’s marketplace spans nearly the entire patient journey by including vendors across Population Health, Scheduling, Intake, Patient Education, Care Pathways, Billing, Forms, and Patient Surveys, with additional vendors joining soon.
“Patients respond better when they are communicated with in ways that work best for them,” said Steve Callis, President of Payments, RevSpring. “Collaboration among technology leaders to drive a consistent experience is the right thing to do for patients. By integrating with Artera Harmony, we are pleased to extend the reach of our solutions even further, to help healthcare providers increase patient engagement and payment rates – with as little friction as possible.”
Five Cornerstones of Artera Harmony
The Artera Marketplace is the foundational layer underpinning Artera Harmony. Additionally, there are five components to Harmony equipping healthcare providers with tools to streamline patient communications, minimize message overload, and consolidate various channels – throughout the patient journey, including:
- Developer Portal: Enables digital health vendors in the Artera Marketplace to quickly integrate with Artera’s four APIs via self-service integration capabilities by creating services, keys and reviewing API documentation. The secure portal will enable quick integrations and vendors to easily route their patient communications through Artera Harmony.
- Staff Console: Intuitive interface for healthcare staff to easily manage all patient communication workflows in one place. Thanks to real-time integration capabilities across all leading EMRs, the staff console serves as a living, breathing hub for patient communications that can be quickly customized by provider staff without waiting for an external IT team or ticketing process.
- Conversation Builder: The next iteration of ChatAssist AI, Harmony’s Conversation Builder, which harnesses NLU, will introduce new usability improvements for staff to easily build robust, multi-step conversations that independently automate routine patient communications and free up valuable staff time. Providers can also access the template library to get started quickly with conversational messaging and tailor the communications as appropriate for their organization.
- Conversation Manager: Replaces Artera’s existing Automations Manager, where provider staff can create, prioritize, apply and manage rules around all of their conversation workflows – whether designed within Artera or delivered via a third party.
- Intelligent Analytics: Analytics platform that delivers embedded analytics, strategic reporting capabilities and performance benchmarking so that providers can compare their communication performance to similar size, specialty and geographic organizations via anonymized data, and predictive insights using AI will be available later this year.
Meaning Behind the Name
By definition, the term Harmony refers to the interaction, collaboration or cooperation between two or more parties: a succession of notes forming a distinctive sequence. In music, the result is a cohesive sound that delivers a sense of balance and calms noise for the listener. Artera Harmony echoes this concept by bringing smart coordination to patient-provider communications and collaboration across the vendor ecosystem to calm the noise of disparate messaging and deliver a well-orchestrated communications experience for patients.
More than 25 Artera customers are already using components of Harmony via Artera’s Beta and Early Access programs which test and validate the functionality across different production deployments; the full solution will be generally available in the second half of 2023.
