Introducing Artera Harmony: Our Most Ambitious Platform Yet

I founded Artera in 2015 with a mission: make healthcare #1 in customer service. Today, Artera proudly supports 750+ customers who facilitate 2.2 billion annual communications for 68+ million patients, and invests over $33M/yr in R&D and Customer Experience to deliver the best product in the market.

Despite this strong traction, we haven’t achieved our mission…yet. This week we are one step closer with the announcement of Artera Harmony. It’s our most comprehensive platform update ever, and a culmination of our work and learnings for the past eight years.

8 Years to Harmony 

For the past eight years, we’ve been building, listening and learning from our customers. Our team has been deeply rooted in what may seem like a niche area of healthcare to some - patient communications; but to us, it’s everything. 

Quite literally, we’re obsessed. And with all good obsessions, we’ve been studying, observing and analyzing it for years. 

And over the past year, I’ve become acutely aware of a problem that (likely aggravated by COVID) has spiraled out of control: an abundance of technology systems, specialties, and providers who are all competing for attention from the same patients.

Over the last year, our team has conducted market validation, 1:1 discussions with 50+ health providers and I personally conducted listening sessions with 100+ customers. These efforts yielded several consistent themes: 

• The average health system has over 11 digital health vendors that communicate (e.g., text, IVR, etc.) independently with patients.
• Often, these digital health vendors are managed by different departments within the health system, with limited-to-no awareness of competing communication workflows or messaging backlogs.
• There is limited-to-no coordination of message importance, timing or cadence, resulting in communications appearing out-of-order and lacking context.
• Many patients feel “over messaged” and report message fatigue, resulting in poorer response rates and adherence.

We Heard The Problem Loud & Clear:

Too many texts from too many numbers and vendors, totally uncoordinated. And no true solution to the problem. 

Health systems have had to make the trade-off between:

(a) an “all-in-one platform” with inferior products, useability, and returns, and 

(b) multiple best-of-breed systems that take too much overhead to manage and get working cohesively together. 

Until now.

Introducing Artera Harmony

Artera Harmony is an open system that orchestrates patient communication by integrating a hospital’s digital vendors, managing communication workflows from multiple stakeholders, and delivering communication to patients in a single unified and cohesive communication thread. It is what I first dreamed of when establishing Artera, a vision that has been years in the making and is finally mature enough to introduce to the world.

I recently chatted with HIT expert Jessica DaMassa from WTF Health (What’s The Future Health) to share our vision for Artera Harmony. I’ve shared this conversation below.

Five Cornerstones of Artera Harmony

Artera Harmony has five components that equip healthcare providers with the ability to deploy cohesive and unified patient communications:

1. Developer Portal: Makes it easy for digital health vendors and providers to quickly integrate into Artera to send communications to patients
2. Staff Console: Delivers an intuitive platform for staff to easily manage all patient communication in one place
3. Conversation Builder: Allows staff to independently create and automate multi-step communication workflows (e.g recalls, referrals, surgery prep, education etc), eliminating manual work and freeing up their valuable time
4. Conversation Manager: A rules interface that allows hospital administrators to manage all of their communications with patients – whether designed within Artera or another digital health vendor – to create the best experience possible for patients (eliminate over messaging, prioritize certain workflows over others, etc)
5. Intelligent Analytics: A robust analytics platform where you can view communication performance across all digital health solutions and workflows, this includes predictive models with recommendations on where to optimize, and performance benchmarking to similar specialties

Powered by the Artera Marketplace

Healthcare is inherently closed as an industry (just look at the friction involved in adopting open standards). At Artera, we believe the quickest path to solving healthcare’s challenges is by collaborating with others. We aim to set the bar for collaboration and open standards, and it’s why we founded a marketplace: an open platform that brings together the best companies in their respective verticals to deliver communications in a thoughtful, coordinated way. This will drive optimal outcomes.

The Artera Marketplace spans the patient journey with partners across Population Health, Scheduling, Intake, Patient Education, Care Pathways, Billing, Forms, Patient Surveys and more. At launch, this includes 30+ digital health vendors, like Arcadia, Blockit, Bright.md, Flywire, Gozio Health, Tonic, WebMD Ignite, and Xealth. We welcome others, including our direct competitors. Please contact me or check out our Marketplace page to get started.

Below is a discussion with Dan Dodson, MBA, MSMI , who leads innovation at UNC Health, about his shared belief in vendors working together to solve healthcare’s most pressing challenges:

What’s Next with Harmony

We are fortunate to have more than 25 Artera customers already using components of Artera Harmony via Artera’s Beta and Early Access programs which test and validate the functionality across different production deployments. Our full Artera Harmony solution will be generally available in the second half of 2023 and we cannot wait to unlock the full potential of the vendors being used across our 750+ customers, representing more than 17% of the facilities across the United States.

- Guillaume