Change Healthcare Builds Enterprise-Scale Patient Notification System Using Amazon Pinpoint

Change Healthcare’s mission is to accelerate the transformation of the US healthcare system and help payers, providers, and consumers improve clinical and financial outcomes. To support these goals, the company needed a highly scalable, consistent solution that could send hundreds of thousands of messages per day to patients at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. “At the beginning of 2020, patients did not want to visit a hospital, not even for regular lab tests,” says Manoj Yadav, product manager at Change Healthcare. “Patients wanted to interact with healthcare providers through digital means. However, these solutions were not complete, and patients often did not have timely notifications, which impacted communications.” 

Working with the AWS team, Change Healthcare developed and implemented a robust SMS notification system to support various internal and external solutions. The company selected Amazon Pinpoint for its cost effectiveness, enterprise-level features, and simple setup. “Other vendors required complex setup, but Amazon Pinpoint was the simplest solution to implement,” says Yadav. “We were able to roll out an enterprise-grade system very quickly on AWS.”

Change Healthcare implemented its Amazon Pinpoint solution in two phases. First, the company configured API calls to handle all SMS transactions for outbound communications. Then, Change Healthcare developed a self-service user interface for managing SMS templates. “The implementation of Amazon Pinpoint was very smooth,” says Yadav. “We encountered very few errors. When we did experience difficulties, we received support from AWS to resolve them.” Change Healthcare was able to build and implement each phase of the SMS solution in 3­–4 months. 

Using Amazon Pinpoint, Change Healthcare can send more than 200,000 SMS messages per day. With a centralized notification solution in place, the company has improved the quality and consistency of its SMS messages. “When we implemented Amazon Pinpoint, we unified all teams across our enterprise,” says Yadav. “Our solution also solved several problems that teams using individual SMS solutions had previously encountered.” Using Amazon Pinpoint, Change Healthcare was able to achieve 99 percent successful SMS delivery and vastly reduce time to onboard healthcare payers and providers onto the SMS system. 

Change Healthcare’s SMS notification system provides customers with granular visibility into patient communications, which is vital to the highly regulated healthcare industry. One of the key requirements for Change Healthcare was to find a solution that confirmed whether a patient received an SMS message. “Our customers were not willing to adopt a system without confirmations,” says Yadav. “But on Amazon Pinpoint, we can track the status of SMS messages from when the message is sent to when it is delivered to the handset. This level of visibility is not available on other solutions.” Amazon Pinpoint is also HITRUST certified and HIPAA eligible, further meeting the needs of healthcare payers and providers. By inheriting security and compliance controls on AWS, Change Healthcare’s solution is capable of meeting HIPAA requirements.

Using Amazon Pinpoint, Change Healthcare is delivering timely, accurate notifications to patients while reducing SMS onboarding times. With this scalable, enterprise-grade solution in place, the company is streamlining patient communications and meeting the unique needs of healthcare payers and providers.