Postponing preventive care can lead to poorer health outcomes and higher costs. This health system recognized that traditional mass outreach often failed to engage patients, particularly those who were healthy but disconnected from care. The organization implemented the Upfront by Health Catalyst® suite, using data-driven insights and psychographic segmentation to personalize outreach. By understanding patient motivations and tailoring engagement strategies across email, SMS, and phone, the organization proactively guides patients to close care gaps, improving overall health, enhancing the patient experience, and supporting more effective, targeted care delivery.
More than a third of insured adults delay care, which worsens health outcomes and increases expenses.1 The health system recognized these delays as a critical challenge for keeping patients healthy and connected to care.
The health system recognized the cost of disconnection and delayed care. Preventive screenings declined post-pandemic, particularly among healthy, disengaged patients. The organization understood that one-size-fits-all outreach often failed to close the care gap. It needed a new solution to engage its patients in closing care gaps to improve health.
The organization implemented the Upfront by Health Catalyst suite to move beyond traditional mass outreach, using a personalized, behaviorally intelligent, data-driven, and automation-enabled solution to provide its patients with proactive care guidance. Upfront provides the health system with real-time insights that help it identify care gaps, predict patient behaviors, and refine engagement strategies.
The organization leveraged Upfront’s psychographic segmentation to understand patient motivations and barriers, classifying patients into segments based upon motivations, preferences, and engagement habits. The health system targeted its outreach to patients who needed an annual physical examination, those with a diabetes care gap, and individuals who required a mammogram.
It developed and deployed unique activation strategies to address the underlying motivations of each psychographic segment. The organization started with email outreach. Based on patient responses, engagement channels were expanded to include SMS and phone, and then graduated to quarterly, automated, omnichannel outreach, featuring easy visit scheduling options, to boost engagement and close care gaps.
The health system’s personalized, data-driven analytics solution produced impressive results, improving patient engagement and care gap closure. It actively engaged more than 150K patients in closing care gaps, without creating additional patient outreach work burden for care teams. Using Upfront resulted in 14 percent higher average open rates than industry benchmarks (average of 37 percent open rate), facilitating the closure of care gaps, including:
The organization enhanced the patient experience, fostering trust and loyalty, supporting network providers so they could focus their time and efforts on patients needing extra support, and improving contract incentive performance.
"Upfront's combination of behavioral science, data-driven personalization, and automation allows us to close care gaps at scale while freeing care teams to focus on patients who need more complex support."
- Director of Communications
The health system will continue to use Upfront to engage and guide patients. It has expanded using the Upfront analytics solution to manage high emergency department utilization and plans to improve its campaigns by integrating social determinants of health data.
