Health Robocalls People Want to Receive

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"It helps to 'tickle' people first with a call that doesn't ask for anything," notes Alexandra Drane, Eliza's president and other co-founder. She mentions a call in which recipients heard a little jingle about eating beans. "One hundred percent of customers who received the call remembered it and were open to more contact," Drane says. "It earned the HMO the legitimacy to call back and ask something of their members."

Eliza might follow up a call by sending information by mail, e-mail, or text. When necessary, it can also pass a person over to a clinician. One of the advantages of the system is that clinicians have more time to spend on the phone answering patient questions because they aren't spending time on the initial outreach. (Another, according to research by Dr. Warner Slack of the Clinical Informatics Div. at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, is that people are more honest if they are conveying health-related habits to an automated system rather than a person.)

To help Kaiser increase participation in its Thrive Healthy Living programs, Eliza created different phone calls for different at-risk groups. The calls used inclusive language to make the messages seem nonjudgmental, as well as a warm, empathetic voice, which the company has found is most effective for lifestyle-management topics. The smoking call, for example, led with the statement: "It doesn't really matter if you smoke, or just know someone else who does, we all know how hard it can be to quit."

The result: 28% of the people reached either said they smoked or that someone close to them did, greatly exceeding Kaiser's previous benchmark of self-reported smoking behavior; 45% of those respondents wanted information on smoking-cessation tools, and 79% of people who were offered a follow-up mailing said yes.

cost savings for companies

Many clients see financial upside from Eliza's programs. Pharmaceutical companies that use Eliza to remind patients to take their prescriptions report higher drug sales. A program Eliza ran for an HMO alerting members to less expensive drug alternatives saved those members $11 million over 18 months. And companies that shift calling duties from clinicians to Eliza save costs.

For Kaiser, the estimated $2.5 million it spent on the Eliza outreach didn't lower operating costs. But the program was much cheaper than hiring nurses to reach members.

For the moment, Eliza is focused on health care, an industry co-founder Drane has worked in for decades as a strategy consultant, entrepreneur, and, immediately prior to Eliza, founder of Tesseract, a developer of health-related software and services that is now part of Empower Software Solutions in Orlando, Fla. But while Drane's passion is health care, she sees broader opportunities for Eliza's technology. "Eventually we may look beyond health care," she says. "We could license the system or just do it ourselves."

Jessie Scanlon is the senior writer for Innovation & Design at BusinessWeek, where she covers the intersection of design and business.

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