Twistle today announced an expanded deployment of its two-way patient engagement platform with Providence St. Joseph Health (PSJH) to improve patient engagement around surgical episodes of care. Fourteen hospitals across the PSJH health system have decided to deploy Twistle for use in spine surgery, joint replacement, colorectal surgery, bariatric surgery, cardiovascular and OBGYN following in-depth technology selection and pilot testing.
Twistle’s platform allowed PSJH to innovate its surgery care pathway to engage patients through mobile apps, text messaging, email and interactive voice responses. PSJH will also be able to connect its own digital storefront to the Twistle platform. The Twistle patient engagement pilots were a collaboration between PSJH’s digital innovation group and clinical teams.
“Our quest is to simplify health care journeys for patients, and we identified surgery as an area of unnecessary complexity that was ripe for improvement through a better digital experience,” said Aaron Martin, Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer at PSJH. “We partnered with the clinical team to test how moving the doctor-patient experience to a digital patient engagement platform would help streamline interactions to build stronger relationships and trust.”
“We’re embracing technology that patients already know and use in their everyday lives as a way to transform health and deliver high-value care,” said Amy Compton-Philips, MD, Executive Vice President, Chief Clinical Officer PSJH. “For patients, surgery is anxiety-provoking and added to that is the complexity of navigating all the things you need to do and know through the entire episode of care. The pilots showed us that managing the flow of information and communication between care teams and patients in a single place made surgery a better experience.”
The impact of Twistle on the PSJH care delivery experience is reflected in the fact that 94 percent of the patients who used Twistle found it to be helpful. Online ratings for physicians improved by an average of 0.9 stars.
The selection process
Twenty vendors were invited to participate in three rounds of increasingly exacting evaluations to support PSJH’s Simplifying Care initiative for surgery. Two solutions were selected, and each one was deployed at multiple hospitals for a six-month pilot.
Twistle’s selection was based on criteria that included metrics for patient outcomes, patient satisfaction and provider satisfaction. Another deciding factor was Twistle’s vision for a platform that uses data to automate engagement while integrating with PSJH’s digital patient storefront and IT ecosystem. Early data from Twistle’s deployment showed that:
- For 614 surgeries across four PSJH hospitals, patient adoption was 95 percent.
- Patients on Twistle had a 16.5 percent lower occurrence of overall complications from spinal surgery.
- Patients went home sooner, with a reduction of 5 percent in the average length of stay. In colorectal surgery, patients on Twistle went home an average of two days earlier than non-Twistle users.
- Twistle patients had a 22.8 percent lower cancellation rate for appointments and satisfaction ratings were 7.2 percent higher than for people not on Twistle.
- Patient calls dropped by 26 percent when Twistle was used in a clinic.
- No-show and cancellation rates for colonoscopy procedures fell by 29 percent at clinics that used Twistle to engage with patients before their procedures.
“Our mission — and passion — is to drive change in the medical field using technology in such a way that patients become partners in their own care,” said Kulmeet Singh, CEO of Twistle. “Better decisions lead to improved outcomes, and at its most distilled form, this saves lives. Providence St. Joseph Health is a visionary organization whose mission mirrors ours, and we are proud of the role we are playing in helping them improve patient health and longevity. This partnership will allow Twistle to reach even more patients through whichever devices they use, from smartphones to email to landlines. Every patient that we can touch is an opportunity to deliver more efficient and convenient health care services.”
