Serving more than two million patients annually, Apria Healthcare is a leading provider of home respiratory services in the United States, including select medical equipment, oxygen and inhalation therapies, sleep apnea treatment and negative pressure wound therapy. Apria’s trained professionals are committed to serving their patients at nearly 300 service locations in the United States.
The Challenge
As a healthcare care organization focused on continuous improvement of the homecare experience through self-monitoring, evaluation and other forms of patient empowerment, Apria wanted to deliver a more frictionless billing and patient communication experience. Improving digital communication options available for patients and driving electronic adoption was essential to meet this goal. Apria also wanted to accelerate payments for a faster time to revenue and reduce the volume of calls related to statements. And they wanted to reduce print costs and consolidate printed output, as well as lower printing and mailing volumes by moving more customers to digital delivery.
Another requirement was to streamline the management of patient and other letter correspondence that has unique multichannel delivery requirements. Finally, they wanted to provide consistent awareness of the Apria brand across all communication channels – an important consideration given the wide range of products and services they offer.
The customer communications management solution they chose had to do all this, plus integrate into a global patient service and support network, and with minimal Apria IT staff involved in the deployment.
The Solution
DataOceans applied its Design for Purpose methodology to reengineer Apria’s communications processes to simplify billing output. DataOceans deployed optimized communications across print, digital and phone channels. The simplified design and calls to action led to a 5% improvement in payment velocity starting within the first month of launch. Combined with optimized billing communications, the SMS capabilities supported by DataOceans helped Apria reduce complex customer service calls, saving 10% on phone transactions overall. DataOceans also deployed a new self-service portal featuring consistent Apria branding and focused on processes to drive eDelivery consent. As a result, eDelivery adoption increased and continues to grow at a rate of 1.5% monthly. The platform deployment was completed without significant investment in time from Apria’s IT department.
The Future
Apria will be expanding payments functionality across additional lines of business. They expect the DataOceans customer communications solution will help them increase wallet share by promoting their full range of products and services to their customers.