CareMessage Integration

CareMessage is a patient communication platform used by health centers across the U.S. Relevant has partnered with CareMessage to provide an integration with its powerful Programs feature.

About CareMessage Programs

In CareMessage, Programs allow health centers to send patients a series of text messages, with branching logic based on patient responses. CareMessage has developed dozens of Programs, curating the content of each in collaboration with health center partners. Some common types of Programs include:

  • Patient Education Programs. These Programs typically involve over a dozen messages, sent to a patient over the course of many weeks.
  • Gap-in-Care Programs. These Programs are designed to close a particular gap in care, and typically involve half a dozen messages over the course of a few weeks.
  • Patient Satisfaction Surveys. These Programs typically involve a handful of questions and responses. As soon as the patient responds to one question in the survey, the next message is sent immediately.
  • SDoH Needs Assessments. These Programs allow health centers to survey their patients around Social Determinants of Health needs and offer available resources.

About the Relevant/CareMessage integration

Relevant and CareMessage have developed an integration that allows health centers to automatically enroll patients in a CareMessage program, based on dynamic audience criteria defined in Relevant.

Here’s an overview of how the integration works for a given program:

  • The health center works with CareMessage to refine the content of a program. The program is configured by the CareMessage customer success team. Health center admins can view the content of a program by logging into their account on www.caremessage.org.
  • The health center works with Relevant to define the appropriate audience for the program. (The “audience” identifies the patients who should be enrolled in the program and receive its text messages, based on criteria such as a visit, a CPT code, etc.) The health center can develop the audience criteria as a SQL query against the Relevant data warehouse, or work with Relevant’s team to do so.
  • When the integration is enabled, Relevant will check the audience for the program every night at 2pm, and send API messages to CareMessage to update patient details and program enrollment status. (Note: this timing can be adjusted on a per-health-center basis, if desired.)
  • The details of the messages sent, patient responses received, and other data about the program are available by logging into www.caremessage.org.

A note about re-enrollment behavior. Once a patient completes a given program (i.e., receives all of the messages in the program’s sequence), they will be automatically re-enrolled in the program if they continue to satisfy the audience inclusion criteria specified in Relevant. See “Technical Details,” below, for more about how re-enrollment behavior works.

Getting started

Beginning in November 2022, the Relevant/CareMessage integration is in a pilot phase. If you’re a customer of both Relevant and CareMessage and would like to join the pilot, contact support@relevant.healthcare.

Using the Relevant/CareMessage programs integration has no additional cost, beyond your CareMessage and Relevant contracts. Purchasing Relevant Outreach, which is Relevant’s built-in text patient text messaging module, is not required in order to use this integration.

Technical details

During the nightly audience sync, Relevant sends two types of API calls to CareMessage. The first type tells CareMessage to “Add a patient.” It provides patient demographic data to CareMessage, including the patient’s name and the phone number to which text messages will be sent. Unless otherwise specified, Relevant will send CareMessage the “preferredphone” as mapped in the Patients data element. _Note: if the patient has already been added to CareMessage, this API call will have no effect.

The second API call tells CareMessage to “Enroll these patients in a specified program.”

Because programs in CareMessage always begin on Mondays, this means the patient will receive their first message in the program’s sequence on the next upcoming Monday. Note: if the patient is currently enrolled in the program, this API call will be ignored. If the patient has already completed the program, this API call will re-enroll the patient in the program, and the patient will receive the program’s series of text messages again, beginning on the following Monday.

Frequently asked questions

Q: In what languages can messages be sent?

A: CareMessage programs can be sent in English or Spanish. For this reason, when adding patients to CareMessage, Relevant checks the patient’s preferred language (as specified in the language column of the Patients data element) and sends “Spanish” if the preferred language is Spanish. Otherwise, we tell CareMessage to set the patient’s language to English.