Increasing Follow-Up Adherence By 50% With End-To-End Automation

Boosting bookings for follow-up exams while reducing admin workload at Main Street Radiology by automating the follow-up process end-to-end.

Thousands of patients come through the doors of New York imaging center Main Street Radiology (MSR) each month, referred by a vast network of physicians. But only one in two patients were returning for follow-up scans, despite the admin costs of notifying referring physicians and chasing patients up for unscheduled or missed appointments.

MSR approached Agamon in search for a cost-effective and scalable way to manage the follow-up process and bring more patients back for vital radiology scans. Specifically, the imaging provider was up against two challenges. First, MSR needed to be able to process hundreds of radiology reports each day to ensure timely detection of incidental or non-urgent findings with recommended actions. Second, was the challenge of personalizing the way this information was communicated with referring physicians and patients. Communications sent to referring physicians and patients via their preferred medium (e.g. email, sms, fax) were more likely to get noticed and prompt more patients to attend recommended follow-up exams. However, MSR did not have the administrative or technological capacity to send personalized alerts at scale.

It was important for our team to understand MSR's challenges. But also to gain insight about other important factors, for instance the organization's business model, growth goals, administrative capacity. This way, we were able to deploy a customized version of the Agamon Coordinate platform, tailored specifically to MSR's current situation, growth ambition and user needs.

The Agamon Coordinate platform automates the radiology follow-up process end-to-end — from detecting actionable findings in radiology reports, to notifying the right people at the right time, and finally tracking follow-up adherence to ensure patients receive the follow-up care they need. The platform has given MSR the automation and personalization capabilities needed to achieve immediate and sustainable follow-up adherence results.

Now, as soon as a radiology report is completed, Agamon's Natural Language Processing technology reads the report to detect any actionable findings. Instances of a finding with a recommended action appear as tasks within the Agamon Coordinate platform. A process that used to take MSR admin staff hours each day is now fully automatic.

As Agamon works behind the scenes to detect and organize information about actionable findings, MSR admin staff have the flexibility to design automated communication flows, or to manually send notifications using pre-prepared templates. If the referring physician or patient has specified a preferred method of communication, Agamon Coordinate will design and send the communication in that form.

Importantly, the business intelligence dashboard that comes with the Agamon Coordinate platform gives MSR's admin and executive teams the power to measure performance in real-time and make data-driven operational decisions.

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Since deploying the Agamon Coordinate care navigation platform, we’ve been able to increase the likelihood that a patient returns for the appropriate follow-up examination at the appropriate time, while reducing administrative costs and administrative workload — Dr. Ari Jonisch, President at MSR

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Since deploying the Agamon Coordinate platform, MSR has been able to increase the number of patient follow-ups scheduled by 50%. Agamon has also increased the likelihood a patient returns for their follow-up exam at the appropriate time. The platform's automation capabilities means MSR has been able to scale the follow-up process, while reducing admin costs and workload.

Ultimately, Agamon has given MSR peace of mind that patients are receiving the follow-up care they need and deserve.