Sparked by the pandemic, many healthcare providers embraced SaaS technology to communicate with patients across multiple departments. Although digital communication has improved patient access and overall patient experience, in some cases, governance and orchestration are still needed to ensure patients are receiving the most important messages in the correct cadence.
In one example, a patient received more than 60 messages in a single day from their healthcare provider. This is the next challenge Artera is solving.
Since 2015, Artera has been working to transform care by streamlining patient communications and reducing staff workload via an open-platform experience that connects every aspect of a patient’s healthcare journey. The company’s recent launch of Artera Harmony was the culmination of eight years of dedication to this mission, according to Founder and CEO Guillaume de Zwirek.
“Since I established Artera, my vision has been to build a more connected patient experience across the entire healthcare ecosystem — not just a single point in time,” de Zwirek said. “Building a robust, comprehensive patient communications platform like Artera Harmony takes time. I couldn’t be more proud of our team who has put in an incredible amount of hard work to bring this vision to the market.”
“My vision is to build a more connected patient experience across the entire healthcare ecosystem — not just a single point in time.”
In a world where patient communication has become fragmented and fraught, Artera Harmony is the solution de Zwirek envisioned, bringing visibility, orchestration and insights to patient communications.
According to Artera’s research, healthcare providers communicate with patients using an average of 11 different digital health vendors for services like telehealth, bill pay, appointment reminders, intake and health portals, which can quickly lead to a cluttered and frustrating patient experience.
What sets Artera Harmony apart is the ability to integrate different solutions, creating an ecosystem that optimizes the patient experience across the healthcare journey and routes patient communications through a unified source. While others may focus on individual moments, Artera’s approach is holistic, focusing on the entire patient experience.
“We developed Artera Harmony to solve this — an open platform that integrates with a provider’s existing tech stack to coordinate communications to the patient in an emotionally intelligent, coordinated way, while also showing visibility and gleaning insights from the vendors within that tech stack,” de Zwirek said. “When you orchestrate the perfect experience for patients, they are more likely to get the care they need,” he added.
STACKING THE BENCH FOR SUCCESS
When Guillaume de Zwirek looks back on eight years of Artera, there isn’t a perfect batting average leading toward the successful launch of Artera Harmony. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes and will continue to,” he said. “But I believe that the more at-bats you have, the more likely you are to hit a home run. And I’ve had the great fortune of hitting several.” In terms of getting to the plate, de Zwirek credits the team’s hard work and putting in time and practice. “That’s what I attribute most of our success to,” he said.
For Senior Vice President of Customer Experience Sarah Shillington, these patient and provider benefits underscore the value Artera Harmony offers both in terms of care and workflow efficiency.
“Our intelligent communications platform has the ability to provide automated responses that are conversational,” she said. “We’re partnering with providers to improve the patient experience via conversational digital engagement while automating routine tasks and conversations. These efforts also help providers tackle major labor-related challenges, such as staff burnout and workforce shortages.”
With access to real-time data and insights through Harmony, providers also have endless opportunities to optimize their patient communications strategy to drive a greater patient experience and improve operational efficiencies.
“Our customers are really excited about Artera Harmony, and especially the dashboard,” Shillington stated. “They can now finally take the blinders off and have greater visibility and awareness into the entire scope of patient communications at their organization, enabling them to make more informed decisions for their patient communications strategy.”
“With the Artera Harmony dashboard, our customers can finally take the blinders off and have greater visibility into the entire scope of patient communications, enabling them to make more informed strategic decisions.”
In order to reach this state, Shillington and the Artera team spent a significant amount of time listening to customers’ most pressing needs.
“Our customers have the best ideas,” Shillington said. “We work alongside them every day to elevate their ideas and pain points, so our team can build tech solutions that solve them.”
SVP of Product and Partner Ecosystem Zach Wood has shared Shillington’s focus on integrating customer and partner input into Artera’s product journey.
“Our goal is to learn alongside our customers and partners,” Wood said. “We met with over a hundred vendors that message patients across 15 categories of solutions from patient acquisition to care management as we built out the Artera Marketplace.”
While building toward Artera Harmony, Wood played a crucial role in launching and scaling the Artera Marketplace, which spans the patient journey with partners across various healthcare domains.
“Today, the Artera Marketplace includes more than 40 digital health vendors who connect with Artera’s open APIs to route communications through the Artera Harmony platform,” Wood said. “We’re proud of the fact that we can integrate with the provider's tech stack, applications and departments to manage communications to the patient in a highly coordinated way.”
Between robust vendor relationships and over 700 customer implementations, Artera has built a deep understanding of best practices in patient communication. Using this knowledge base, the team has developed a conversational template library to deliver communication workflows for daily use cases — including appointment wayfinding, no-show follow-up, and telehealth assistance.
“These have been thoughtfully designed to allow customers to quickly implement key automated conversations within their practices,” Shillington said.
“We were very purposeful about building out our product and staying tightly aligned to customer feedback,” de Zwirek said. “Since our inception, we’ve been building, listening and learning from our customers every day.”
As additional vendors and customers come onboard, the SaaS platform only continues to improve. Those continued developments are powered by Artera’s talented team.
“Something as big as this takes a village,” Wood said.
De Zwirek agreed.
“Our employees are the heart of Artera — we wouldn’t be who we are today without the profound and thoughtful contributions of the entire company,” de Zwirek said. “We're solving big problems, and we have so many exciting opportunities ahead of us.
We’re opening new doors, we’re launching new products, and innovation is through the roof.”
