CirrusMD’s Year In Review

While 2022 delivered new challenges to our customers — including employee retention, rising costs, and managing greater diversity in the workforce — CirrusMD continued to improve our platform, ensuring employees and health plan members access the highest quality, most equitable virtual primary care. 

Through close partnership with our customers, we prioritized these key initiatives in ‘22:

1) We increased physician efficiency to ensure care is truly on-demand.

One of the biggest challenges of in-person healthcare is the investment of time on the patient’s part. Either because it took 2 months to get an appointment, or travel time to get to a provider, or because it takes 45 minutes in the waiting room to finally be seen. Care is inconvenient, delayed and then finally, rushed.

In 2022, our product, development and clinical teams focused on improving physician efficiency, making the physician experience more streamlined, and using technology to help deliver care quickly and at the highest standards of quality.

The success of this effort was proven during the Covid Omicron surge. While encounter volume doubled, the CirrusMD platform and physician network seamlessly scaled. With a huge uptick in volume, patient wait times and satisfaction remained steady, with wait times still under a minute and satisfaction ratings over 92%.

This scalability is key to meeting both customer and patient needs. 

CirrusMD developers use Machine Learning so physicians can focus on providing care efficiently. Key phrases let doctors instantly find information to respond to patient questions, or find referrals to in-network services in customized client playbooks. Doctors don’t have to search for information; they keep the encounter focused on the patient. 

This approach also means that CirrusMD customers reap even greater cost savings, through referrals to in-network services like screenings, lab, prescriptions, and more, while avoiding unneeded in-person visits.

While we won’t use Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence to replace a doctor, we’ll always use leading edge technology to help doctors deliver care with peak efficiency.

2) Your employees and members are increasing in diversity. So are CirrusMD physicians and technology.

Like you, we increased our focus on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. 

Our mission of providing the fastest access to equitable, high quality virtual care for those underserved by traditional healthcare has propelled several expansions. 

For example, we launched built-in language support, so Spanish-first speakers can comfortably chat with any CirrusMD doctor in Spanish, while technology seamlessly translates between doctor and patient.

We increased diversity among our physician network, and today, our physician staff is 56+% female and 30+% non-white.

We included new ways for patients to tell us about themselves — and for employers and health plans to provide detail — so doctors see more than gender or age of their patient. Now they can see gender at birth versus gender identity, race, preferred pronouns, language and more, along with details about existing conditions & previous encounters.

We’ve strategically standardized data elements, creating reporting that’s simultaneously more scalable and granular. Information is more powerful; CirrusMD clients gain greater understanding of care delivered to their employees or members. For example, we helped an employer understand employee satisfaction, resolution rates and outcomes by race, so they could ensure equity among a diverse set of employees.

3) We’re meeting the needs of even more underserved people.

Working together with the Department of Veterans Administration (VA), CirrusMD technology now supports over 4.8 million Veterans across the U.S. through VA Health Chat. With the convenience of text messaging, Veterans connect with a VA healthcare team member for clinical and non-clinical services, to ask questions, receive medical care and advice, refill prescriptions, or schedule appointments, without having to travel to a VA facility.

We focused on Medicaid plans, increasing state licenses and building relationships that allow CirrusMD to now be available to over 4 million Medicaid members. We teamed with plans to design and implement innovative programs to increase member engagement and satisfaction. 

Our certification for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is now “In Process” through our partnership with the VA, with authorization expected to be granted in early 2023.

4) CirrusMD care follows the highest quality standards. We’re creating a more proactive model and offering care covering even more areas.

The most effective virtual care goes beyond acute care, and takes on a wide range of health concerns, including management of chronic conditions. This year, CirrusMD expanded our Virtual Primary Care Clinic, with more hours and more physicians able to support ongoing issues, and provide proactive follow-up with patients. 

Expansion of clinic services means physicians are trained to provide services in even more areas including mental health, weight management, gender transition and abortion referral support, in addition to management of chronic conditions like thyroid, acne, diabetes, hypertension and asthma.

The technology supporting Virtual Primary Care Clinic physicians includes built-in reminders, helping doctors reach out on a specific date to patients needing follow-up care. For example, a doctor can readminister a PHQ-9 or GAD-7 and assess how well a patient is responding to a new behavioral health med.

In 2022, the CirrusMD Provider Network demonstrated best in class clinical efficacy, measuring results that are equal to or better than in-person visits. Assessment tools are now built into the physician view, tracking ongoing data to track:

1. Asthma results
2. Behavioral Health
3. Hypertension
4. HEDIS measurements

5) We expanded Women’s Health to provide greater equity in care and additional services.

Women often struggle to receive equitable and equal care. Providing equitable care across genders means not just offering the same service  — an equal offering to men and women — but recognizing each person has different circumstances. CirrusMD physicians focus on reaching an equal outcome while understanding and considering the individual.

Virtual care can act as a gender-neutral bridge that crosses a wide range of barriers, including socio-economic and geographic.

CirrusMD physicians partner with women patients at every stage of life, from puberty through menopause, assisting with a range of issues including reproductive health. CirrusMD physicians demonstrate compassion and interest in patients’ concerns, and can provide follow-up when needed, one of the great benefits of the platform.

6) We’re supporting employers’ efforts to improve benefits in ways that actually reduce attrition.

Forward looking employers aim to increase the value of benefits, especially given the cost associated with onboarding new employees. With access to healthcare as a key driver of value, CirrusMD has found that extending healthcare benefits to all employees, even seasonal, part-time and unbenefited workers, and making it intuitive, easy and accessible, can be the game changer in reducing attrition. 
This year we partnered with a large employer to conduct a 15 month study measuring the effect of virtual care on employee turnover. This research found a statistically significant correlation between virtual care utilization and lower employee turnover rates across six cohorts, including a 45% overall reduction among those who used CirrusMD’s virtual primary care at least once. Employee turnover declined another 15% for those who consulted with CirrusMD physicians 2+ times versus those who had a single consultation.

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Our thanks for a great 2022!

2022 reinforced our mission of delivering the fastest access to equitable, high quality virtual care, especially for people often underserved by traditional healthcare.

We’re grateful for the partnership of our clients — both health plans and employers — who trust us to deliver patient care that’s unsurpassed in quality and cost efficiency. We’re thankful for our physicians, who deliver care with an uncompromising focus on each patient’s experience. And we tip our hats to our great internal teams who make up the balance of CirrusMD, as we work together to advance the efficiency and value that comes from the right approach to virtual care.