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Enhancing the gaps in care program experience with patient-centered design

27 October 2022

Multiple agencies and organizations measure patient experience as a part of annual reporting and incentive opportunities (i.e., STARS, HCAHPS, NCQA, HEDIS®). When planning gaps in care programs, health plans and clinicians alike may use patient experience as a tool toward more effective interaction, communication and strategy in order to positively impact patients and ultimately, population health outcomes.

Enhanced patient experiences require partners who share your commitment to quality testing services and support. The right lab partner is essential for an organization to increase a patient’s experience across their health journey.

Close gaps in care with the right lab partner

When planning your gaps in care programs and testing services, there are four patient experience concepts to consider:

Concepts for optimizing the patient testing experience

  • Patient engagement
    • Focus on access and personalization
  • Sample Collection
    • Make participation easy
    • Simplify the process with customer support
  • Results
    • Deliver consistent test quality
    • Simplify the process with customer support

Focus on patient access and personalization

Easy access to services is a crucial component of patient experience, quality service and response rates. The most effective programs incorporate services that enable patients to engage easily, receive appropriate notifications and view their results, no matter where they are located.

Make participation easy

Patient experience is at the core of any successful gaps in care program. The most successful programs remove hurdles and engage and guide patients throughout their care journey. This is especially important in the sample collection experience to help ensure quality results, including:

  • Make it easy for patients to successfully complete sample collection the first time with detailed instructions and videos—reducing the need for additional tests and multiple efforts
  • Promote convenience with at-home collection kits and flexible sample return options to improve completion rates

Simplify the process with customer support

Programs should include easy access to customer support team that can guide the patients through the sample collection process if needed and answer concerns and questions along the way. Simplifying the patient’s overall experience can also encourage higher response rates. In addition, this additional support can help reduce the need for dedicated internal resources for testing coordination and support.

Deliver consistent test quality

Consider whether your partner can deliver consistent high-quality testing and patient experiences in any location and across every program. Confirm that your partner has connectivity capacity to deliver data at scale. These details can significantly impact:

  • Program effectiveness
  • Partnership value (from both quality and financial performance perspectives)
  • Patient experience, financial outcomes for your organization and health outcomes for your patient population

Patient activation, engagement and results-driven best practices

Labcorp’s gaps in care solutions offer multiple design and distribution options to help drive efficiency. These range from full-service patient activation and engagement solutions to supplemental services. Examples of how we put these four concepts into practice include:

Patient access

Labcorp offers multiple gaps in care solutions designed to simplify accessibility—all include at-home sample collection kits and online results that make it easy for patients to complete their sample collection where they are. In addition, our full-service engagement solutions include pre-notifications, customer and clinical support that can be easily accessed and help improve the overall patient experience.  

Easy participation

Labcorp leverages human-centric program design in our gaps in care solutions to improve response rates. Our full-service activation and engagement solution (opt-in) provides patient digital communications at each step of the process to keep patients informed throughout their journey. In addition, our at-home sample collection kits include both detailed instructions and prepaid envelopes for return postage to make completing the process as simple as possible.

Customer support

With Labcorp gaps in care solutions, patients not only get sample collection kits in the mail, they also get access to a dedicated team of customer support specialists. These knowledgeable specialists can assist patients with issues throughout their journey, helping to improve response rates and increase compliance.

Quality testing

Labcorp operates a national network of interoperable lab facilities with standardized testing ranges. This consistency allows for more accurate metrics tracking across populations and over time. Our extensive lab network and data connectivity enables our gaps in care solutions to easily scale to meet the operational and logistical requirements of payers and providers, from regional to national organizations.

Optimal patient experience with patient-centered design

Successful gaps in care programs are designed with the patient at the center. Patient experience benchmarks and performance give patients the right data to make informed decisions about their health plan and provider—a key component to customizing one’s own care journey.

Your lab partner should be able to help you achieve your highest patient experience goals, helping your organization take a broad look at your patient population, stratify at-risk populations across lines of business, assess and measure trends and strategize with your plan toward optimal outcomes. A successful gaps in care program will improve the patient experience and should:

  • Focus on easy access and personalization
  • Make patient participation easy
  • Simplify processes with customer support
  • Deliver consistent test quality

A partnership with Labcorp can play a key role in helping your organization achieve high performance of quality metrics and effective health outcomes among your patient population. Labcorp's gaps in care solutions are patient-centric, designed for maximizing your organization’s performance across multiple metrics. They range from full-service engagement solutions through to supplemental services to support existing programs. Our full-service engagement solutions help increase patient compliance with guided support across the patient journey and convenient at-home sample collection—helping to close gaps no matter where your patients are located.

Learn more about how our gaps in care programs can boost patient experience with convenient solutions for at-home testing. Contact us today to get started.

 

HEDIS® is a registered trademark of the National Committee for Quality Assurance.

Sources:

Quality of care strategiesValue-based care