UBMD Success Story - Increase in Compliance with OBERD's SMS Option

08/24/21

University of Buffalo Physician’s Group (UBMD) is the largest medical group in Western New York with over 500 physicians in 18 practices. This allows them to represent virtually every medical specialty. UBMD is a destination for patients seeking everything from state-of-the-art standardized treatments to the most complex health problems. UBMD Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine, one of the many specialties within the UBMD Physicians Group, utilizes OBERD.

Issue/Opportunity:
Prior to OBERD’s patient centric and value driven tools, UBMD struggled to bridge the age gap of accessibility with outcomes noting that their patient compliance was very low.

OBERD Solution:
UBMD began using OBERD’s SMS text-message option to collect patient reported outcomes data and improve patient compliance.

Results: When engaging patients to capture data, it's crucial to keep things simple. Emails often get lost in the clutter. The best way to reach patients is through mobile notifications. With OBERD’s SMS text-message option, users customize simple text-messages that are branded on behalf of their health care institution and the patient’s provider.

In a recent interview, Fiona Reid Cosgrove, Analytics Consultant at UBMD noted, “the organization has seen steadily increasing compliance over the last few years, from a low of 30% to the current status quo of around 80%.” This compliance increase is shown for all age groups. Specifically, “an increase in complete data sets of 20 percentage points for those who have adopted SMS up until age 90.”

Historically, UBMD saw low patient compliance at the 12-month post-op time interval and beyond. After implementing OBERD’s SMS text-message option, they saw improvement at the two-year post-op period: from 16% to 52%. Five-year post-op patient participation also improved, from 9% to 31%.

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Despite improved patient participation overall, UBMD still saw challenges in compliance among its elderly patient population. The solution was to implement an electronic SMS text-message consent and signature process for caregivers at the time of registration. By adding caregivers, such as adult children and medical technicians to the mix - who can complete forms with elderly patients, UBMD achieved the desired compliance.

Don’t fall victim to burdensome data collection. Burden on patients, providers and staff is simply alleviated with straight-forward technical solutions and small patient engagement adjustments such as SMS text-messaging. We know from 11 years’ experience that it’s the little things that make the biggest difference.

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