How Behavior Change AI Supports Population Health

Population health management is taking over the healthcare world, according to the fourth annual State of Population Health survey from Numerof & Associates.

The survey collected responses from 528 providers across various types of organizations, and 99% of respondents agree population health is the future and are considering a population health model. The reason for this is because better management of populations reduces clinical costs, and improves healthcare quality and health outcomes.

As value-based care becomes reality, healthcare systems need to zoom out to keep entire patient populations healthy, rather than narrowly focusing on care only in the moment. To motivate each individual to actions keeping him or her healthy, healthcare systems must customize persuasive communications at scale. This is best achieved through combining artificial intelligence (AI) and behavioral science.

Turn to Communication for Intervention

Under a fee-for-service model, healthcare providers are compensated when they examine, diagnose, and treat patients at the point of care. This puts healthcare organizations in a reactive position where reward comes when responding to patient problems. With a value-based care model, providers must take a more proactive approach to delivering care, preventing the occurrence of health problems in their patient population. It’s a daunting task for health systems, as the traditional healthcare system was not built to be proactive and preventive.

This proactive approach is possible with hyper-personalized communications that uniquely nudge each patient within the population to take healthy actions that are right for them. These messages serve to create a one-to-one dialogue for healthcare organizations to engage every patient before he or she even needs proactive care. This goes far beyond a one-size-fits-all or segmented approach to communicating to patients that does not work among hard-to-reach and hard-to-engage, high cost patients. By focusing on person-centered communication, healthcare systems reach everyone, including previously unreachable populations. They encourage all patients to actively participate in their care.

So, how do you communicate to each patient in a hyper-personalized way? With behavior change AI technology. Here’s how we do it at Lirio:

Lirio identifies targeted behaviors or actions to encourage among patient populations, such as getting routine cancer screenings or enrolling in a patient portal.
Our technology uses behavioral science evidence to solve for patient barriers and benefits to action. There can be many. They’re often different—even conflicting—for each individual, which is why personalizing each message is key.
Next, we craft message elements. For an email, this includes subject lines, images, headlines, nudges, and calls-to-action.
Our platform assembles content elements into tens of thousands of unique message combinations that are matched to individual recipients.
As a patient within the population interacts with messages, the machine learning agent optimizes performance — improving first at the population level, then at a cluster level, and finally at the person level — ensuring each individual receives the message most likely to move him or her to action.

Realize Long-term Benefits from Behavior Change AI

Population health management is the fast-approaching evolution of healthcare. Your organization needs to prepare for the new normal of value-based care. As you transition to this care model, behavior change AI can help you:

Optimize Engagement: One of the first steps in keeping patients healthy is engaging with them via patient portals. Through person-centered communication, behavior change AI moves your patients to sign up for your portal and actively participate in their care, increasing patient education and reducing healthcare system costs.
Close Gaps in Care: Identify and mitigate high-risk, high-cost vulnerabilities among your patients for improved care delivery across the continuum. Digital communications built with behavioral science principles help patients take the right steps for their specific healthcare needs.
Improve Outcomes Measurably: Track the effectiveness of hyper-personalized messages both in terms of patient responses and actions, and health outcomes overall. Under value-based care, measuring and reporting patient outcomes on a population level will be critical to your success.

Take the Right Population Health Step with Lirio

By applying behavioral science and AI to digital communications, Lirio helps healthcare systems move patients along their journey to better health. We’ll work with you to deploy behavior change programs at scale, so you’re set up to improve care delivery across entire populations and reduce your costs.

We’d love to hear more about your population health initiatives. Our team will be at the Population Health Summit for Payers & Providers, February 24-25 in Nashville. Contact us to schedule a meeting at the show.