Best Practices for Using Client Groups in Healthie

Healthie enables you to create client groups in order to organize your clients and to tailor their experience. You can use Healthie groups in a variety of ways to streamline workflows within your business and ensure smooth communication with clients. If you're new to client groups, you may want to watch this Quick Look video on understanding how groups function. 

Examples of Groups for Businesses

Depending on how you structure your business, you may leverage client groups in a variety of different ways. 

• Lead Gen/Freemium Group: If you offer “freemium” services, you can add any clients taking advantage of this to a group within Healthie. Being that these are potential clients, it’s important to be able to market to these leads within the platform, through message blasts, emails, documents, and discovery calls.  Adding these leads to Healthie can help you track their journey from potential to paying client and assess the strength of your sales funnel. 

• Insurance Clients: Creating a group for your insurance clients can help you streamline all of your other workflows within Healthie, including intake flows, appointment types, and scheduling. You can read our best practices for onboarding insurance clients here. 

• Program Clients: When running a program, it can be extremely beneficial to group participating clients together within Healthie. This way, you can easily send message updates to all participants, host group check-ins, share documents, and more. Clients can offer support to one another 

• Age Range or Health Need Groups: Another way to make sure the right information is reaching the right clients is to group them by their demographics. For example, if you work with patients who span a large age range, it might be beneficial to divide them into groups based on age range to make sure each group has access to the correct appointment types, documents, package, programs, etc. Same goes for clients with similar health needs (i.e. diabetes, eating disorders, celiac disease, etc.); having them in the same group ensures each client receives the right intake flows, receives the correct message blasts,

Onboarding Clients into Different Groups

When leveraging client groups within Healthie, it’s important to make sure your account is set up to support these client groups across all platform features. Be sure to run through this checklist to make sure your Healthie account is ready to support all of your client groups:

1. Create an intake flow for each group: An intake flow is a series of forms that new clients will be asked to complete and/or sign electronically via Healthie. Forms can be completed from both the web browser, or from a mobile device. When you have a specific intake flow triggered to send when you add a client to a group, you can be sure you’ve collected all of the necessary information based on that client’s health and demographics. Healthie’s intake forms can be customized using a variety of question banks, meaning you can build your forms exactly how you need. 
2. Create a specific appointment type for each group: Based on the needs of each group, you may have different appointment types to accommodate the different services you provide. Clients will see the name of the appointment, so be sure you can distinguish appointments for each group while still remaining professional in the names. Read more on creating appointment types here. 
3. Create a package for the group: Based on how you structure your client groups, you may want to have certain packages only available to certain groups. When you build your package, keep the demographics of the group in mind and be sure to make it visible only to the group(s) you built it for. Read more on how to build client packages here. 
4. Customize your automatic emails: While currently in Healthie you cannot send custom emails to individual clients or groups of clients, you can customize your email templates that send after certain actions are triggered in Healthie. For each appointment type, you can create specific reminders and confirmations to go to clients, as well as custom emails for each program and package purchased. If you have client groups associated with individual appointments, programs, and packages, it is best practice to make sure these emails are customized to speak to the specific clients in each group. Read more on email customization here. 

Cleaning Up Client Groups 

For your workflows, and for good account hygiene, there may be instances where you'd like to consolidate or remove certain client groups. As changing a client's group can potentially trigger new paperwork, you'll want to follow the steps below to avoid any unwanted requests. If the client has already completed specific forms in the past, they will not be prompted to complete those forms again. 

• Archive all inactive clients, which will remove them from their current group 
• Review your intake flows, and make sure the right groups are associated with the right intake flows. 
• Confirm your default intake flow, as any clients who are NOT in a group will automatically be assigned to that flow
• Delete unwanted client groups, before you delete the group you'll be asked to reassign the clients to a new group 
• Alternatively, you may want to manually move clients from one group to another
• Review your appointment types to confirm they are associated with the correct/new client groups 
• Review your client packages to confirm they are associated with the correct/new client groups

Best Practices for Engaging Client Groups

1. Leverage the community chat feature: Adding clients to a group can be a strategic way to keep them accountable by adding an additional level of support. Within community chat, clients can share text, photos, and documents with each other. As the provider, send weekly messages in the group chat to encourage participants to share progress, ask for advice, and support other group members along their health journey. Real-time support from their provider is a powerful motivator for clients; but, when clients can receive support from people in a similar position, they are increasingly likely to improve health outcomes and make positive progress. 
2. Hold group check-in sessions: Building on the idea of leveraging client groups for added accountability and support, you can host group Zoom sessions for your client group. Some clients may want the opportunity to talk with you and other group members face to face, to facilitate a relationship and receive advice in real-time. Within Healthie’s calendar, you can invite an entire group to a Zoom appointment, make the appointment recurring, and send follow-up forms after the appointment. 
3. Build custom programs for each group: When building a program, similar to a package or appointment type, you can make it visible to only certain groups. Programs are a great way to engage clients between sessions, as you can have them complete educational modules, watch videos, download documents, and more. Tailor the content of the program based on the needs of the group. You can make the program an optional add-on to the services you already provide, or include it in your basic service package for the group. Learn more about building programs for clients here. 
4. Change client groups as they progress: Depending on where your client is within their wellness journey, there may need to come a time when they will need to be placed in a new group. Be sure to monitor client progress closely, and change a client’s group once appropriate. If leveraging features such as group chat and Zoom appointments, having support from others at a similar stage as themselves is crucial; i.e. a client in a group they cannot relate to is not going to feel as motivated to succeed. While clients can only participate in one group at a time within Healthie, it is easy to change a client group when the time comes.