Is Cortico a Patient Engagement Platform?

There are many software products out there that claim the appellation “Patient Engagement Software”. One would assume this name imply patients actually use the software. Quantitatively, in most cases these products often do not engage the majority of patients at a healthcare organization.

• A prominent Canadian system cites 50% as their goal for engagement rate. They’re one of the best, and it goes down from there.
• In my most recent customer discovery call, a clinic cited a disinterest in patient engagement products because only 17% of patients enrolled. Other discovery calls, interviews and case studies have found similar numbers.
• Another prominent Canadian system was reported by our 2 of our customers at below a 10% engagement rate.
• According to Arya EHR, only 13% of patients book online.
• One of the top 3 most objections in our sales calls is the org has tried online booking, and patients would not use it.

Perhaps it’s still early days for patient engagement software, and these category results will improve over time. By contrast, Cortico is obsessed with measuring engagement rate. We believe it’s our responsibility to get users into the software and benefitting from it.

As a result, our clinics reach the tipping point where a majority of patients actually prefer booking online and do so by default. In fact, many of our customers have reached 100% online booking and completely disabled their inbound phone line. This last result leads to another consistent phenomenon: When we tell new healthcare orgs about it they typically stare in silent disbelief for 5 seconds.

In summary, it’s better to consider Cortico as a new way of practicing online by default, rather than adding a system to increase patient engagement. Lastly, it’s much easier for Cortico to become the default patient booking channel because it only requires 1 to 2 hours of staff training for the manager, and other staff typically require no training at all. Of 130 locations that have tried Cortico for at least a month, none have looked back to the old way of doing things!