Health information exchanges (HIEs) are gaining ground and growing more popular with every passing day. What can hospitals do to ensure that their physicians as well as the physicians in the service area have all the tools they need to communicate effectively and do business with the facility? Remembering that physician offices are in different stages of adopting current technologies, what is the answer to "how can we do business together" - no matter what their place is on the adaptation curve?
An essential aspect of building and maintaining productive working relationships with physicians in the health system and the surrounding areas is communication. In today's healthcare world, several forms of communication are being utilized – some old, some new – and hospital have to be able to take in information in all forms and put it into viable use.
The ability to send and receive data can change the way a hospital spends and saves money. Without the right technology in place, physicians and staff can spend up to:
- 2-3 hours per day scanning and indexing items
- 1 or more hours a day looking or searching for clinical information
- 1-2 hours a day waiting on the phone to schedule appointments
In a typical 8 hour work day, up to half of the day could be spent on not seeing patients, but doing research or waiting on hold.
With workflow inefficiencies and disjointed processes such as this, it is easy to see why both patient and physician satisfaction can quickly spiral downward. Being fully aware of time-utilization issues and satisfaction rankings, hospitals and physicians’ offices need a way to "push" data where it needs to go, and have it get there without getting lost and without delay.
With ForSite2020® Fax Order Collection, Utilization & Storage (FOCUS), hospitals can receive physician orders from offices that haven't implemented electronic health record (EHR) technology. ForSite2020® FOCUS is a paperless fax management system that removes the stress of lost or incomplete orders by automating and improving the current process of physician faxed orders. This module allows a physician office without an EHR to "push" information to the hospital, which in turn allows the patient to be scheduled automatically with all the necessary information at the fingertips of the hospital's scheduling staff. No longer are physician or staff members beholden to making phone calls about missing faxes or misplaced orders, they can simply trust that the orders arrived at their destination just as they were sent out. In addition to offering connectivity to the HIE and other physician offices, ForSite2020® FOCUS can also help reduce costs in physician offices by up to $44,000 annually by improving workflow and efficiency, giving physicians and staff more time to treat patients.
For those physician offices that are in the process of converting, or have already converted to EHR technology, Unibased offers a physician portal: ForSite2020® Physician Order Collection and Enterprise Tracking (POCET). This module has the ability to not only create electronically signed, legible orders but can process faxed orders through intelligent OCR recognition – eliminating the need for interpretation and keying of an order. ForSite2020® POCET easily integrates with other EMR systems within the physician community, with the HIE itself and has the ability to take HL-7 messages. Having ForSite2020® POCET in place in physician offices will provide new access channels for a physician's referral base and reduce call center demand while, in conjunction with an EHR, helping to create a savings of $134,000 annually by streamlining the scheduling process.
With disparate information coming into hospitals through various different forms and avenues, and all requesting services at a certain time, hospitals need to be hyper-aware of how and when work requests are being handled. ForSite2020® Work Queue Management effortlessly creates a repository for all services throughout all departments, facilities, practices and clinics in the health departments, facilities, practices and clinics in the health system efficiently tracking and monitoring the continuum of care for enhanced productivity and increased revenue. Work Queue Management automatically interacts with all other ForSite2020® products and modules. Through this complete integration, ForSite2020® Work Queue Management allows providers to reach new operational heights by replacing manual, time-consuming processes with automated information "pushes", based on priority, to the most qualified and available resource. By reducing manual intervention, ForSite2020® Work Queue Management lessens the number of points of failure, resulting in a reduction of clinical, operational and financial errors. Hospitals can estimate an annual savings of more than $600,000 based solely on enhancing workflow processes.
Electronic connectivity strengthens relationships with physicians through good communication practices – the outcome being an increase in revenue as well as improving clinical decision-making and patient care by having access to information in a timelier manor. Unibased offers the same commitment to excellence in our modules as we do with the rest of our products. All of our products can be integrated into an HIE and EHR setting, and are fully customizable to the client’s needs.
[Source: Medicity Issue Brief: Quantifying the Value Proposition for Electronically Connecting Hospitals and Community Physicians.]
