Mend
Redefining Engagement in Telehealth

It’s no secret: healthcare communication technology often lags years, if not decades, behind other industries. It’s historically difficult to find the intersection of HIPAA compliance and useful communication that facilitates engagement within the medical community.

Poor communication among care providers and patients leads to serious medical errors in the worst instances and cancellations and no-shows in the best. These missed appointments amount to a staggering 25 percent of all scheduled appointments in the United States.

Healthcare is also fraught with systems that encourage manual data entry and lead to human errors, missing information and misplaced documents. Matt McBride, President & CEO of the healthcare communications platform Mend, recognized the vast opportunities for customer service and experiential improvement in the healthcare ecosystem, and the Mend team has built a platform to do something about it. Mend is focused on enhancing whole-patient care with a state-of-the-art, fully integrated engagement and communication platform. “With an in-depth understanding of our customers’ challenges, we are focusing on developing solutions that boost patient experience, improve healthcare communication, and amplify engagement,” McBride said.

Mend’s best-in-class telemedicine platform sets a benchmark for innovation in healthcare with a comprehensive suite of tools including solutions for telehealth, paperwork automation and secure messaging. What differentiates Mend from other healthcare portals is the ability to actually eliminate paperwork and, as a result, significantly curb overhead by automating workflows of any complexity. As a telemedicine portal, Mend enhances treatment with robust reporting, multiple language support, scheduling, file sharing, screen sharing, queueing, transferring and much more. Mend is fully HIPAA compliant with data encryption both in motion and at rest.

Conventional communication systems like phone calls, mail and faxes fail to engage with patients adequately. Mend’s robust communication platform disrupts these antiquated systems, encourages instant engagement and significantly reduces no-shows and cancellations. “While other patient portals have a 5 to 10 percent engagement rate on an average, our engagement rate averages 81 percent. We have clients with engagement rates as high as 98 percent,” McBride added.

While other patient portals have a 5 to 10 percent engagement rate on an average, our engagement rate is 75 percent

Mend reinforces the commitment to whole-patient solutions by offering unmatched support and innovative tools for integration. Their Instant, in-house technical support has an average response time of less than 30 seconds. Mend remains Electronic Health Record (EHR)/ Practice Management Software (PMS) agnostic, which allows the platform to integrate seamlessly with any back-office or clinical systems-- even closed systems with no HL7/API access. The cutting-edge, proprietary integration technology seamlessly transfers data among multiple systems in considerably less time and at a significantly lower cost than older standards.

McBride points out that the vast benefits of Mend’s telemedicine and engagement platform are best exemplified through their client, IMPOWER. The behavioral health organization serves a primarily Medicaid population and previously operated out of 4 locations with regularly increasing operating costs. Further expansion was stymied by overhead costs and complicated intake processes. By implementing Mend’s telemedicine solution, Impower has transformed into a 100 percent virtual service provider with a single location. The organization digitized all paperwork, referrals and workflows, and their provider group integrated Mend with their EMRs. They now conduct therapy and interact with providers through video on mobile devices and computers.

Sprinting ahead full steam, Mend aims to further expand its integration capabilities and bi-directional interface. With access to Mend, patients can attend treatment, update demographic information, review medications and treatment plans, sync data and make payments from a single platform. And McBride says that’s just the beginning. “After huge success in the small and mid-sized market, we have expanded our features and capabilities to cater to large health groups by engaging their population as an enterprise-class solution,” says McBride.