Text Messaging Featured Article

Assisting the Medicaid population is not always easy, as low-income families are often difficult to consistently remain in contact with. One possible solution could be to use email and even text-messaging to communicate with them better. While many worry that lower-income families aren't equipped with the necessary technology, HealthCrowd is seeking to employ a text-message-based patient engagement strategy and has found that 86 percent of the Medicaid population could access SMS messages.

“Over 80 percent of the population we intervened on had a mobile phone,” said the company's CEO and cofounder, Neng Doh. HealthCrowd seeks to be an active role in Medicaid patients' healthcare by sending messages that encourage healthy lifestyles and remind patients to take their medication. “Historically, a lot of Medicaid plans have had the preconception that because their members were lower income, that they didn't have mobile phones. Another preconception is that people don't want to pay for these messages or [that they] find them intrusive. We absolutely debunked that as well. Our response rate was anywhere from 30 to 60 percent and our opt-out rate was really really low; it was 3.7 percent.”

By dispelling these myths, HealthCrowd has carved a niche for their product and business strategy that was previously thought not to exist. The program also encourages users to take action with their healthcare, and the survey of 941 Medicaid patients to test HealthCrowd's functionality encouraged around one third of them to go in for things like vaccinations and simple checkups.

The program proved to be 100 times as effective as postcards, 50 times more than buckslips in the mail, 30 times more effective than voice calls and 15 times as effective as email. The simple fact is that Medicaid patients are incredibly receptive to the idea of a text-messaging service that offers healthcare tips for all stages of life. Ultimately, this will lead to a more preventative mobile healthcare approach that will encourage these families to take care of their health issues before an expensive emergency room visit.