WELL HEALTH INC. ANNOUNCES CALL TO TEXT TO REDUCE HOLD TIMES AND ABANDONED CALLS BY ALLOWING PATIENTS TO SWITCH CONVERSATIONS TO TEXTING

Call to Text Feature Piloted By Altura Centers for Health With Promising Results

SANTA BARBARA, Calif., May 10, 2021 – Well Health Inc., a SaaS digital health leader in patient communications and 2021 Best in KLAS winner in Patient Outreach, today announced  Call to Text to reduce hold times and abandoned calls by switching the caller to text messaging and automatically texting the caller when the call is dropped or abandoned. The WELL™ Health Call to Text and Abandoned Call feature is now available to all hospital provider customers.

“The WELL Health Call To Text and Abandoned Call feature helps solve the frustration many patients experience when calling their provider only to wait on hold, get a voicemail or have the call dropped,” said Guillaume de Zwirek, CEO and founder, Well Health Inc. “Communication throughout the patient journey should be frictionless. This new solution helps providers deliver on that promise by giving the patient the power to communicate via text when, how and where they prefer.”

Altura Centers for Health, a Federally Qualified Health Center averaging 18,000 monthly inbound calls, piloted the Call to Text and Abandoned Call feature to support its patient population that includes Medicare, Medi-Cal, private insurance, and uninsured patients, spanning from Bakersfield to Fresno, California. In the first 90 days of using the WELL Health Call to Text and Abandoned Call feature, Altura saw its call abandonment rate drop by approximately five percent or nearly 1,000 calls per month. 

“Texting is preferred by many of our patients since they can text for an appointment without having to wait for their break times or even after work hours,” said Arnie Reynoso, Chief Information Officer, Altura Centers for Health. “The WELL Health Call to Text feature allows patients, who are short on time, to switch their phone calls to text messaging, rather than wait on hold, wait for a callback or just hang up. Moving these important health conversations to SMS/texting allows the patient to respond on their terms and on their timing, ensuring they get the care and answers they deserve from healthcare providers.”

This new feature from WELL Health is ideal for healthcare providers interested in evolving call center functionality to meet patient expectations for seamless, intuitive, digital communications from their provider. In fact, data from Accenture shows 51 percent of patients would switch healthcare providers for great customer service.1 Additionally, more than half of patients surveyed expect digital capabilities from their healthcare provider – from requesting prescription refills to booking appointments2, indicating consumer expectations have shifted away from traditional paper and phone-based workflows to digital communications.  

The WELL Health Call to Text and Abandoned Call feature, currently available with Jive Voice and Cisco phone systems, is the latest solution from WELL Health to help healthcare providers improve the patient experience. This news follows the recently-announced partnerships between WELL Health and EHR leaders Cerner Corporation and MEDITECH, making WELL Health the patient-communication solution for both of these EHRs’ customers. WELL Health has also partnered with Twilio to help healthcare providers rapidly implement secure patient communications at a time when the need to communicate with patients securely and quickly has never been more critical.

WELL Health’s Role in COVID Vaccine Efforts

Since the COVID vaccine became available in the United States, leading healthcare providers have used WELL Health communications technology to:

  • Facilitate more than 6 million COVID vaccine appointments
  • Send 30 million COVID-related messages

About Well Health Inc. 

WELLTM Health is a SaaS digital health leader in patient communications and the 2021 Best in KLAS winner in Patient Outreach. WELL Health’s intelligent communications hub is the only two-way digital health solution engaging patients throughout their entire care experience. WELL Health enables conversations between patients and their providers through secure, multilingual (19 different languages) messaging in the patient’s preferred communications channel: texting, email, telephone, and live chat. WELL Health helps 200,000+ providers facilitate more than 1.1 billion messages for 37 million patients annually. By unifying and automating disjointed communications across healthcare organizations, WELL Health reduces unnecessary provider stress and potential errors, while increasing patient visits and loyalty. 

Founded in 2015, WELL Health is based in Santa Barbara, California. WELL Health has been named No. 10 on 2021 Forbes America’s Best Startup Employers list, among the 2020 Best Places to Work by Modern Healthcare and ranked #170 on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing private companies in 2020.

For more information, visit https://wellapp.com.