Digital Health Done Right: Twine Health

May 23, 2017
Julia Zehel -

Digital Health Done Right is a Redox Blog Series that shines a light on a member of our interoperable network. We believe in what our partners are doing and want to share their stories and outcomes with you.

If there’s been one common thread throughout the companies featured thus far in Digital Health Done Right, it’s the thought that elevated and improved healthcare extends beyond the four walls of the doctor’s office. We’ve seen this with Glooko, Docent, and Tytocare, and each one does a fantastic job integrating different aspects of a patient’s life into one seamless and cohesive healthcare experience.

This week’s company, focusing on population health, is no different; Twine Health delivers personalized care plans by extending the scope of care into the real world. Their application, called Twine, is used by workplace health providers and patients to build detailed care plans that are truly collaborative, cohesive, and effective in managing health and delivering positive outcomes.

Anyone trying to manage any healthcare condition can use Twine, but it’s most frequently and effectively used to take control of and treat the four common chronic conditions:

Elevated personal care

Ask any employer and they’ll tell you that the most difficult part of getting an employee health program up and running is enrollment—people just don’t want to begin a new program and often drag their feet getting started. Twine’s number one priority is getting people to sign up, and they achieve an average 80% improvement in enrollment by offering an easy social sign-in process and an incentives and rewards program to help get people on board. They also build out a personalized Health Activation Profile upon enrollment, which delivers a thorough health risk assessment based on the new-user information.

Once folks are enrolled, any employer will tell you that the second most difficult part of employee health programs is keeping people engaged—by and large, people tend to have a hard time integrating a new management system into their daily routine. To address this common problem, Health Activation eschews impersonal care in favor of care plans that are extremely customized, thus giving users a greater sense of ownership around their care.

Twine uses Redox to push and pull medical data from a patient’s electronic health record. This up-to-date and accurate medical information enables all members of the care journey to view patients’ progress along with patient-generated data to see a holistic picture of their care.

Each patient can specify what goal they are working toward across the entire spectrum of conditions, be it lowering blood pressure, reducing the risk of heart failure, or simply maintaining their weight. The ability to tailor the program to their wants and needs while using their own health data results in an 85% monthly participation rate.

Since sustained positive behavior is the key to achieving long-term health goals, Twine uses frequent, light-touch communications to keep people on track while offering visual representations of progress to increase motivation. With Twine, 90% of patients with previously uncontrolled chronic diseases were able to get their conditions under control within three months.

Collaborative care across the continuum

The key to Twine’s success is its collaborative and complementary functionality. Designed to be used by care teams, coordinators, providers, businesses, and patients, the platform’s user-intuitive design allows communication between all parties to be simple and direct. For example, the difficult road to eating healthier for someone with high blood pressure might start with, “skip the sausage on your breakfast sandwich twice this week.” The plan might also include “take your lisinopril (medication) each day,” and “check your blood pressure once this week.” The plans are automatically synchronized to the patients’ phones, and they get reminders to complete the actions throughout the day. As patients check off those actions, Twine builds out their profile with progress towards goals and adherence rates.

These inputs then trigger alerts for coaches and other care team members, enabling timely intervention, support, motivation, and celebration through the secure messaging feed.For an excellent example of this collaborative care at work, check out this quick video from Twine:

Beyond the easy communication, the features offered are rather robust: from enrollment campaign management, health risk assessment profiles, and calendar scheduling all the way to data reporting, real-time analytics, and full integration with any EHR, Twine was designed to be a one-stop-shop for cohesive health management.

Twine is also compatible with nearly all devices, from a desktop Mac or PC to Androids and iPhones, and even iPads. With all elements of the care journey accounted for, Twine is truly a platform that gives employees and their car teams every tool they could need to effectively manage their health.

With new tools and resources like Twine at their disposal, people can better understand their health and implement the right steps to improve it. Twine is a fantastic example of how effective technology can be in helping patients take a more proactive role in their own healthcare, and we’re proud to have them in our interoperable network.

For more on Twine Health, check out their website here, and come back next week when we spotlight another a digital health application that improves the modern healthcare experience.

If you’d like to receive future installments of “Digital Health Done Right” delivered straight to your inbox, make sure to subscribe below.

Stay in the know! Subscribe to our newsletter.