Fertu Concepts – Fertu

The Fertu platform simplifies patient engagement through automated, omnichannel communication. To effectively navigate and maximize its value, it's important to understand a few key concepts:

Campaigns

Campaigns are centralized efforts designed to communicate with patient populations. Each campaign can span multiple steps and leverage different channels (SMS, email, phone, direct mail), allowing personalized, timely, and relevant outreach.

Steps

A Step is a specific point in time within your campaign when a communication is sent to patients. Each campaign consists of one or multiple steps, scheduled at defined intervals or specific times. Steps allow you to orchestrate sequences of outreach, such as sending an email on day one, an SMS reminder two days later, and a phone call follow-up after a week. This is done through a step delay, which allows you to control the gap between two steps.

Key aspects of Steps include:

Timing Control: Steps allow scheduling and control of when messages are sent

Multistep Campaigns: Chain multiple steps to create a structured communication journey.

Variants within Steps: Steps can have multiple Variants for targeted messaging and experimentation.

Example:

Step 1: Immediately send a welcome message upon patient enrollment.

Step 2: Follow-up after 48 hours with appointment details via email.

Step 3: One week later, execute a reminder call.

Variant

A Variant is a version of content or timing associated with a specific Step. By creating multiple variants within a single step, you can perform targeted outreach (e.g., target high-acuity patients with specific content) and experiments (such as A/B tests) to evaluate and improve patient engagement.

Variants allow you to specify by:

Content template (different messaging, wording, or visuals)

Timing (sending communications at precise time of day and incorporating preferred timezones)

Channel configuration (e.g., double-sided print for direct mail)

Merge variables to dynamically substitute content

Example:

Within a Step that sends an appointment reminder:

Variant A: SMS reminder at 9 AM, targeting English speakers.

Variant B: SMS reminder at 6 PM, targeting Spanish-speaking patients.

Merge Variables

Merge Variables allow you to dynamically personalize your campaign content by automatically inserting specific patient or campaign-related information into your messages.

Instead of sending generic messages, you can personalize communications using patient-specific details, increasing relevance and engagement.

Common uses include:

Patient’s first name (e.g., {{first_name}})

Appointment date and time (e.g., {{appointment_date}}, {{appointment_time}})

Provider or referral source (e.g., {{provider_name}})

Custom messages or disclaimers tailored per patient segment

Custom or personalized survey links

Fertu provides standard merge variables out-of-the-box (e.g., patient name, date fields) and allows defining custom variables based on your specific campaign needs.

Templates

Templates are reusable communication components designed to streamline patient outreach. Rather than repeatedly creating messages from scratch, you can leverage templates for consistent, personalized, and efficient engagement across multiple communication channels.

Fertu supports content templates for these channels:

Email Templates

Standardized emails that can include rich text formatting, images, and actionable links to engage recipients effectively. These templates can be built in a user-friendly editor or by pasting an HTML code (if you have an existing template that you want to use).

SMS Templates

Short and concise messages optimized for mobile delivery, enabling quick alerts or reminders with high engagement rates.

Phone Templates

Pre-scripted voice calls or voicemail messages, ideal for automated appointment reminders, follow-ups, or notifications. Fertu platform enables TCPA-compliant dialing, voice mail detection, custom recordings, and transfer to live agent call center.

Direct Mail Templates

Professionally formatted mail communications, such as postcards or letters, delivered physically to patients to complement digital outreach.

Templates often include merge variables, enabling dynamic content personalization. For example, each template can address patients by their first name, mention appointment details, or reference provider names automatically. In addition, direct mail templates support static or dynamic QR code placement.

Example Use of Templates:

Appointment Reminder SMS:

"Hi {{first_name}}, just a reminder that your appointment is scheduled for {{appointment_date}}."

Email Newsletter:

A monthly educational newsletter pre-formatted with branding, containing personalized health tips or updates.

Follow-up Postcard:

A professionally printed postcard reminding patients about wellness visits, customized with their provider's contact details and branding.

Follow-up Call:

A call that introduces the health care benefit, provider, and the sponsor (health plan) and offers the call recipient to engage with an agent in English or Spanish or opt out.

By utilizing content templates, your organization ensures consistent messaging, reduces manual work, and effectively scales personalized communication.

Populations

Populations are specific groups of patients provided by your partners (e.g., health plans) with explicit permission for outreach. Populations can also represent continually growing groups, such as patients referred daily to your organization from various sources.

Campaigns target these populations with tailored messages personalized based on patient preferences, referral sources, or other demographic and clinical attributes. Within Fertu, you can define populations dynamically by segmenting patients using available data attributes, such as:

Demographic data (age, location, preferred language)

Clinical data (condition type, risk level)

Referral details (source, referral date, provider type)

Engagement history (e.g., response rates, previous interactions)

Leveraging these attributes allows you to create precise segments that optimize message relevance, timing, and overall patient engagement.

Cohorts

In Fertu, cohorts help you organize and manage your patient populations within a campaign by grouping or subdividing them into meaningful segments. Using cohorts, you can precisely tailor timing to a smaller group of patients, messaging, and tracking for subsets of your overall population.

Fertu supports two primary cohorting strategies:

Fixed Cohorts

With fixed cohorts, the assigned population for a campaign is divided into predetermined groups. Each cohort is static—once created, its membership doesn't change. This approach is ideal for campaigns where the entire population is known ahead of launching the campaign.

Example:

A patient population of 1,000 is divided equally into two fixed cohorts of 500 each.

Cohort A receives an SMS reminder.

Cohort B receives an email reminder.

Ideal for:

Controlled experiments

Planned campaigns with defined groups

Awareness (pre-enrollment) campaigns

Dynamic ("Daily") Cohorts

Fertu also supports dynamic cohort creation, known as "daily cohorts". These cohorts are automatically formed based on a specific event or date—often referred to as "date-driven cohorts."

This approach is valuable when dealing with ongoing activities like patient referrals, where new populations enter campaigns continuously:

Each day's new referrals automatically become their own unique cohort, allowing targeted communication and tracking.

Members within each cohort progress through campaign steps together, maintaining consistent timing and messaging.

Example:

On March 10, your organization receives 10 new patient referrals. These 10 patients automatically form a cohort entering the same onboarding campaign.

On the following day, 8 additional referrals form a separate cohort, receiving their communications on a synchronized schedule distinct from earlier cohorts.

Ideal for:

Referral-based patient populations

Ongoing or recurring outreach scenarios

Engagement (post-enrollment) campaigns

Client

A Client in Fertu is a partner entity to which specific populations are associated. Clients may be referral partners (e.g., providers or organizations referring patients to your services) or health plans with whom your organization has established value-based care contracts granting permission to market to their populations.

Typical client examples include:

Referral Partners: Healthcare providers or groups regularly referring patients who require tailored onboarding and ongoing engagement.

Health Plans: Entities under value-based care contracts, allowing direct marketing and communication to their member populations.

Associating populations with specific clients helps streamline targeted outreach. It also enables transparent reporting back to those partners, clearly demonstrating program efficacy, patient enrollment success, and detailed engagement metrics. This visibility fosters trust, partnership strength, and continuous improvement in collaborative patient engagement efforts.