If you’re in healthcare practice management or hospital administration, you know the pain of “transactional” care and service functions.

Routine reminders and patient follow-ups can be hugely time-consuming. Calling folks individually is a drain on resources that could be better deployed elsewhere, and typical automation solutions fail to generate any real interest or engagement on the part of the recipient; how fast do you hit delete on obvious form emails?

This conundrum results in one of two things happening: staff spending time on non-value-add tasks instead of on delivering quality care, or outcomes suffering and negative metrics like readmission ratesrising.

That’s why we’re thrilled to see – and be part of – the rise of personalized, automated healthcare communications. Take the example of Boston Heart Diagnostics, as featured on CIO.com:

Typical medical laboratory reports could hardly be less personal. Whether they’re for basic blood work or a battery of tests for serious disease, the black-and-white printouts of results–presenting a sea of cryptic abbreviations and numbers–remain largely indecipherable to the patients whose health depends upon them.

But CIO 100 award winner Boston Heart Diagnostics is replacing such documents with personalized reports of 25 pages or more for people with cardiovascular disease. The in-depth, graphics-driven Boston Heart Diagnostic Reports are customized for specific individuals, and cardiologists sit down with patients to review them. The reports address patients directly, using their first names, and deliver one-to-one information about their health status, including actions to consider. Patient-friendly and easy to navigate on the front end, they’re powered by complex algorithms on the back end, using Boston Heart’s proprietary medical informatics system to integrate the patient’s laboratory test results with clinical risk factors (such as age, gender and family history) and the latest research and clinical guidelines.

The results of such a campaign are massive. The automation saves valuable time and effort (and consequently, money), and care improves as patient engagement increases. As anyone in healthcare knows, both of those are pretty great!

Check out what Stephanie Selby, RN and VP Health Services at Riverside Health in Baltimore, had to say about ATS partner GoMo Health, which provides automated engagement solutions:

“GoMo Health assists us in a significant way by offloading and automating communications that routinely bog down our nurse case managers and service coordination team. This allows us to cost effectively deliver case management interventions to all of our members at the most appropriate level without compromising quality. Our clinical staff can better focus on high-priority cases and achieving desired results.”

That’s the power of “personal” in healthcare.