Boosting Member Engagement with Azara Patient Outreach

Providers and health plans often face challenges in getting their patient-members to come in for annual visits. These visits are crucial for preventive care gap closure, early detection of health issues, and overall well-being. However, many patient-members never schedule these appointments with their health plan assigned PCP because they are unaware of the assignment or the benefits of going in for a preventive visit.

Azara Patient Outreach (APO) is designed to address these challenges by leveraging advanced data analytics and personalized communication strategies to help practices effectively engage their attributed members. The platform enables practices to automatically send targeted SMS messages to members that have been attributed to them by health plans, but have either never established care or have not had a recent visit. With near real-time data from practices' EHRs, patients stop receiving messages as soon as a visit is scheduled, and/or start again if they no-show for the given visit. This set-it-and-forget-it solution ensures no front desk staff or population health team needs to manually move data between tools or call patients to engage with them.

The impact of APO on member engagement is a true success story for integrated data and technology driven workflows. Practices that have implemented APO have seen a significant increase in the number of attributed members coming in for their preventive visits, regardless of whether the member has come to them for care before. When Azara looked at the data for 2024, we found that there were over 360,000 attributed members that had previously established care at a practice on DRVS, but hadn’t had an encounter with them in over a year, which is what we considered an indicator of a disengaged member. Then, we looked at what percentage of those disengaged members ultimately had an encounter with the primary care practice before the end of the year and found that practices that were using APO were 4 times more likely to get their patients engaged than those without APO. While this could indicate that practices without APO were not reaching out to these disengaged members at all or that they were doing so through less efficient and more inconsistent methods, the results speak for themselves as to the efficacy of an automated outreach tool.

Practices that were using APO were 4 times more likely to get their patients engaged than those without APO

A similar problem, that is a real pain-point for providers, is how to engage members that have been attributed to them by a health plan that they’ve never seen. These unmatched members are included in the clinical quality measures that providers are held accountable for as a part of their value-based care contracts with health plans, but since they have never established care with the practice, the provider has no opportunity to close any care gaps. APO provides a similarly impressive impact here, as when we look at the 379,000 unmatched members attributed to practices on DRVS in 2024, only 3% of those members ended up establishing care with their attributed PCP. But when we break that number down between practices that had APO vs those that did not, we found that having APO resulted in a 7 times higher rate of unmatched members engagement than practices without APO. This difference takes into account data availability and responsibility, as all of these practices had their Plan data integrated into DRVS and were expected to outreach to their attributed members as a part of their value based care contracts.

Having APO resulted in a 7 times higher rate of unmatched members engagement

With Azara Patient Outreach, practices can effectively transform member engagement without adding administrative burden to already overworked staff. By ensuring that more members have regular preventive care, providers can increase the rate at which care gaps are closed and risk factors are identified for a health plan’s population. These preventive visits also allow providers to intervene earlier in treating chronic conditions, which reduces the need for more intensive treatments later and avoiding extended inpatient care. Through this engagement, practices can achieve higher clinical quality measure performance, risk adjustment factor recapture rates, and cost savings through reduced hospitalizations; all while producing better health outcomes for their patients. This helps ensure a healthier future for all involved: patient, provider, and health plan.