The Indian healthcare model is reactive and prolongs the patient’s mentality to use the system, I.e., once your symptoms develop, you seek care. While a major amount of cash and energy targets treatment, therapies, and treatment, the opposite 90% of contributions to health outcomes are under targeted. In line with the CDC, there are five categories of SDOH; healthcare access and quality, education access and quality, social and community context, economic stability, and neighborhood and built environments.
At Simbo.ai, we regularly discuss ‘meeting the patient where they are’. This phrase is ambiguous but loosely means a shift to patient-centric care that identifies specific barriers and healthcare needs during a patient’s journey and delivers the tools and support them in an accessible way. The patient-centric model instinctively considers these social determinants of health when determining how to connect a specific patient with healthcare resources. These economic and social conditions can intersect at various points within the healthcare journey and may snowball effect. As an example, the health situation may be a huge economic barrier to healthcare access. In addition, there’s a major correlation between education and healthcare access and specific communities’ mistrust of medical systems. Understanding the role of those social determinants of health and addressing them within the care journey proactively improves health outcomes and minimizes health disparities. Of course, this is an unlimited undertaking and doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all solution. Still, thankfully, technology has made strides in personalizing healthcare and connecting with patient populations in several ways to boost engagement.
The digital exterior door is an integrated digital experience that educates and empowers patients on their healthcare journey. At Simbo.ai, the digital exterior door solution consists of various conversational modules like symptom checker and care recommendations, and center escalation, to call some. Access to those digital tools can support patients in a very range of social and economic positions. The key to opening this digital outside door for patients afflicted by a spread of social determinants of health is within the outreach strategy.
With a digital front entrance solution, healthcare organizations have the chance to efficiently reach consumers through automated outreach and interact with patients to shut care gaps around routine screenings, annual exams, vaccinations, and beyond. Simbo.ai Outreach supports healthcare organizations in identifying patient populations, creating personalized, proactive campaigns around scheduling, appointment reminders, treatment follow-ups, education reinforcement, and more. In the deployment of those campaigns, the Omni channel and multilingual capabilities of Simbo.ai are what successfully engage patients and open their digital front entrance. In the past year, we’ve witnessed these gaps in care deepen because the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affects low-income and minority populations with historically poorer quality and access to healthcare. These disparities continued into the vaccine rollout.
One healthcare organization utilized Simbo.ai Outreach to cascade communication to specific populations and offer personalized vaccine education and scheduling guidance to combat this. This strategy successfully meets patients because it accounts for the assorted social and economic situations patients are also in and standardizes the standard of support for every patient.
