Rural Hospital Using Secure Texting to Improve Patient Experience with Zach Wood Artera and Meg Jackson Beauregard Health Systems

Zach Wood, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Artera, and Meg Jackson, Director of IT for Beauregard Health Systems, join to discuss patient engagement in a rural healthcare setting that previously relied on minimal patient communication, relying on phone calls. The introduction of two-way texting has increased patient engagement, streamlined appointment scheduling, and improved medication adherence.  In communities with fewer landlines and limited broadband and computers, this secure texting solution is easy to use and available on patients' mobile devices for convenient access and an effective way to supplement in person care. Zach explains, "Artera works with a very broad set of provider organizations, ranging from specialty clinics to health systems to even federal agencies. We have about a thousand customers that we serve and have organizations like Beauregard that partner with us very closely in rural environments."   Meg elaborates, "We may have had some phone calls going out to patients before Artera, but no text reminder. So this was a brand new world for us. We wanted to bring more to the text message, to the patient on their personal devices. We live in a rural area, so maybe broadband is less accessible in our area. So we were trying to bring something to their devices for the patient." "Well, everyone today has a cell phone. Not everyone has a computer. A lot of people don't even have home phones anymore. So we wanted to get that as a text message to the patient, where they could just respond to it. The beauty of Artera, which first drew me to Artera, was the two-way communication. The patient can initiate the conversation without ever having been a patient here before. They can text the main number of our facility and start a conversation, and we can even have different rules set up on the Artera side, where it could trigger a certain conversation based on the patient's keywords. So that really empowers us to make it more customizable for our patient communication." #Artera #BeauregardHealthSystem #DrFirst #EmpoweredPatient #MedicationAdherence #HealthEquity #RuralHealth #HealthcareInnovation #PatientEngagement #DigitalHealth #RuralHealth #PatientExperience #HealthIT #SecureMessaging Artera.io Beauregard.org Download the transcript here