How to Spark Continuous Engagement With Patient Stories
Patient engagement and the telling of their stories is vital to your organization. In many cases, they’re the underpinning for the everyday activities of your patient-focused group: patient services, fundraising, advocacy, etc.
These stories should be compelling, inspirational, and — perhaps most importantly — dynamic. The journeys of your patients are constantly changing with every new treatment and breakthrough in your disease area. In order to drive impact, the patient stories you’re amplifying should reflect this ever-evolving landscape. A steady stream of fresh, new stories will drive engagement for every mission-focused activity you conduct.
In the busy world of patient advocacy, it can be easy to fall back on the patient stories you’ve already gathered, which likely just represent a snapshot in time. Perhaps it’s difficult to find new patients that are willing to share their narratives. Alternatively, you might be inundated with emails and unable to pick the best stories within a disconnected maze of folders.
The experts at Array Insights can help. We’re an agnostic software and service provider that provides integrated technology for patient-focused organizations looking to enhance the impact of their mission-driven activities. Our newest product, Tallulah, is a next-generation AI platform built specifically for gathering and managing patient stories.
As we’ve partnered with more organizations, we’ve seen patterns emerge around the quest to drive continuous patient engagement through patient narratives. Let’s discuss three common problems that patient-focused organizations face, as well as strategies to help alleviate them.
Obstacles to Continuous Engagement
A patient’s disease journey is never static. Unfortunately, certain roadblocks sometimes prevent organizations from keeping their patient stories up-to-date and relevant:
Difficulty sourcing new stories from patients
It’s not uncommon for organizations to lean on the same handful of patient and caregiver stories that they’ve been using for years. Time and budget constraints can leave staff with little time to gather new stories. Fresh stories can liven up your marketing materials and add additional intrigue for fundraising, advocacy, and grant writing work — but the process of gathering them can be a blocker.
Tallulah’s Generative AI Copy Assistant is designed to help staff draft compelling calls to action faster than ever before. Instead of asking for a monetary donation, the copy assistant can draft a call to donate your story that can be shared over any of your owned channels” social media, email lists, blogs, etc. We like to call it a “first draft engine,” in that it will drastically cut the time of writing multiple campaign messages from scratch. Perhaps best of all, proprietary info is stored on your own secure enclave, which isn’t the case with open-source tools such as ChatGPT. By mixing up your calls to action, you are diversifying the ways that your patients can engage with your organization and increasing the impact you have on your community.
Too many patient stories to effectively manage
Other organizations might find they have the opposite problem: a steady supply of new stories, but little infrastructure to vet these stories and find the most compelling ones. Dealing with a maze of disconnected folders, emails, word docs, and CRMs makes it difficult to handle each story with the care and compassion it needs.
Tallulah uses AI-driven search to help patient-focused organizations find, tag, and categorize their stories. Advanced elastic search functionality, boosted by machine learning, makes it easy to find the stories or photos you’re looking for. Users can keep everything organized, rather than relying solely on memory or failed mailbox searches. When you’re not spending time searching, you can dedicate more energy to identifying the most compelling stories.
Keeping PROs up to date
When willingly shared, patient-reported outcomes (PROs) can provide inspiration for formalized stories. However, these PROs are often written in a scientific or research-oriented manner, and they only represent a snapshot in time. These narratives are much more impactful if they can be refreshed and enhanced. For example, you’d want to know how a patient is faring one, two, or three years after a certain treatment: not just immediately after.
Tallulah helps generate automated notifications that check in with patients every six months to hear how their story is developing. Instead of relying on calendar reminders and manual reach-outs, Tallulah provides forms that patients can fill out to give much-needed updates to their stories. Patients who aren’t able to use a computer can even speak their stories to Tallulah, which uses natural language processing (NLP) to pull the dialogue into structured feedback. Keeping your patients engaged with your organization is key when sharing their dynamic journeys.
Implementing Tallulah For Your Organization
If you’re feeling any of these pain points around continuous patient engagement, Tallulah might be able to help.
Our next-generation, AI-driven technology is designed specifically for the patient story management process. Tallulah allows patient-focused organizations to:
- Utilize advanced machine learning technology to categorize and organize stories effectively;
- Easily find the most engaging stories using elastic search functionality;
- Employ secure generative AI to draft content for email campaigns and pitches;
- Gain insights into the geographic and demographic representation of stories through a dashboard view; and
- Track and measure the impact of their patient stories.
We’ve already partnered with several next-generation patient groups to implement Tallulah, including TOUCH, The Black Breast Cancer Alliance, the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation, and the Pink Fund.
Patient stories that are current and relevant will always drive the most impact. We encourage you to check out Tallulah to learn more about how AI can help your organization amplify and gather patient stories.
Schedule a call with our team to learn more about how Tallulah can drive continuous patient engagement for your organization.