Blog Part 2: Improving HIV patient retention with process automation

In the last instalment of this blog series, we looked at how technology can foster better understanding of patient cohorts, which in turn can support services to identify which patients have disengaged with or are at risk of disengaging with HIV care.

And while fast, accurate insight into patient cohorts helps services to better understand the problems they face, it isn’t the full solution. What (and how) services use this insight is also crucial.

Attempting to reengage lost patients, of which there are currently 4,500 in England alone, or prevent at risk patients discontinuing with care, using manual processes is time consuming, inefficient and error prone. Its effectiveness is also questionable.

Contrastingly, technology can automate elements of the reengagement process; empowering services to work smarter, not harder.

Here’s how:

• Once services have established clarity over their active care cohorts, intelligence can be layered onto technology in the form of service defined rules.

• This intelligence can be used to identify patients in the HIV care cohort who haven’t interacted with the service for a defined period before triggering a task into that patient’s record.

• This will then appear on a healthcare professional’s list to review and decide what action to take.

Where appropriate, it is also possible to automate the entire process, including:

• Identity verification of the cohorts.

• Identification of potential vulnerabilities or factors that increase risk of disengagement.

• Personalised patient contact by text, email, or secure message via patient-facing systems like Inform Personal Health Record.

With technology (service defined rules + data visualisation) doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes, services can move away from manually contacting patients individually to smartly segregating patient groups and automating intervention. The outcome? More efficient and effective patient retention and reengagement processes.

But how can this be taken a step further? In the next instalment of this series, we’ll be exploring technology’s role in supporting services to improve the caseload management associated with retaining and reengaging patients in HIV care.

To learn more about how Inform HIV and the PHR can support your service to better manage loss to follow up click here.