Meet New Core Standards for MBSAQIP Accreditation with Solutions from Sequence Health Written by web_developers on October 19, 2016. Posted in Bariatric Surgery. The Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Accreditation and Quality Improvement Program (MBSAQIP) released version 2.0 of their Bariatric Accreditation Standards as of October 1, 2016. These standards set the core benchmarks critical for achieving success as a bariatric surgery center. Whether you are one of the 700 previously-accredited facilities, you’re working toward becoming accredited, or you’re simply striving to provide the highest quality care, newly released updates to these core standards should affect how your facility is managing patients and processes. Studies show facilities meeting these standards greatly reduce the risk of serious post-discharge complications, including mortality. Watch the October Webinar On Demand for an In-Depth Look at Sequence As A Solution View the Updates: 9 standards now defined by MBSAQIP: 1. Case volume, patient selection, and approved procedures by designation level 2. Commitment to quality care 3. Appropriate equipment and instruments to care for at-risk patients with special needs 4. Critical care support 5. Continuum of care 6. Data collection 7. Continuous quality improvement 8. Ambulatory Surgery Centers 9. Adolescent care Let’s take a look at some of the highlights of version 2.0 including the addition of new definitions and clarification throughout the document that are meant to ensure consistent interpretation of the following updates: You will notice some newly recognized categories, including Ambulatory Surgery Centers and Adolescent Care. You can visit the MBSAQIP website for more information about those newly identified standards including the addition of Ambulatory Surgery Center as a designation and removal of Band Center designation. Most significantly, accreditation for Ambulatory Surgery Centers is separate from the fully accredited inpatient metabolic and bariatric comprehensive and low acuity centers and requires partnership with an inpatient MBSAQIP-accredited center to ensure continuum of care. This new designation requires compliance with standards 1-7 in addition to the new Standard 8 requirements specifically defined for Ambulatory Surgery Centers. Perioperative Care Pathways are required by MBSAQIP to close the loop, using data to identify opportunities for Quality Improvement and Process Improvement initiatives. Each accredited facility is required to identify and implement strategies for continuous improvement. Redefined guidance for data-driven Quality Improvement and Process Improvement initiatives. [Meet New Core Standards for MBSAQIP Accreditation with Solutions from Sequence Health] Discover how Sequence allows you to optimize the patient experience throughout the care continuum. The platform allows you to define configurable care pathways according to your steps of care. Data and analytics viewed through the Sequence reporting feature let you identify where improvements can be made. The Sequence Care Transition feature provides post-operative follow-up engagements to identify and manage patients at risk for adverse reactions within the required 30-day and long term follow-up periods. Sequence Health is your solution for achieving success in your bariatric program. LOOK FOR SEQUENCE HEALTH AT OBESITY WEEK AT BOOTH 726! Contact us today to learn more about our unique approach to medical innovation. Sequence Health Phone: 888.986.3638 Email: [email protected]
Fee for Service vs Value Based Care in Healthcare Payment Reform Written by web_developers on September 30, 2016. Posted in Orthopedics. Payments in the medical world have long been a point of debate, especially as the cost of health care continues to rise. Fee-for-service payment structures have historically been the norm, allowing physicians and medical centers to bill for each appointment, test, and procedure performed. However, as quality of service evolves and demands for standards of care increase, so do the possibilities for payment. Lead by CMS, or Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the medical culture in the United States is moving away from its roots and into a new era of value-based pricing. Deviating from traditional norms is generally a challenge, especially for hospitals whose staff and technology support fee-for-service care. However, with support from the right software platform, it’s possible to bring any medical facility into the new horizon of patient-focused care. Fee-for-Service In the wide world of medical payments, fee-for-service has been the standard throughout much of the modern world of medicine. Under this systems, billing and payments are determined based on the procedures performed by a doctor as opposed to the outcome achieved through medical care. While initially a strong concept, the current climate has shifted. Increasingly, physicians are feeling pressure to perform ancillary testing and optional procedures for the purpose of billing insurance companies rather than generating results. Value-Based As the name implies, value-based care is assessed, and rewarded, based upon the value practices and procedures offer patients. Instead of taking a numbers-based look at the services performed, value-based healthcare delves deeper, providing payments based on successful outcomes and healthy patients rather than the number of procedures used to get there. With a marked emphasis on lower costs of care and reduced time spent in in-patient facilities, this approach attempts to qualify, not quantify, the medical climate in the United States. While value-based systems are still in their infancy, numerous medical bodies, including CMS, are pushing for complete industry reform. Deciphering the Difference In an ideal world, fee-for-service and value-based systems will not at odds with one another, but rather working in tandem to provide the best possible patient experience. For example, a standard annual physical cannot necessarily be evaluated in a value-based manner, requiring a fee-for-service approach. These changes are instead intended to provide a uniform standard of care in surgical and procedural cases, such as CMS’s proposed Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement program and the passage of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015. Making the Transition With countless medical records platforms and billing systems built around a fee-for-service model, incorporating value-based payment bundles into a practice can be exceptionally daunting. Transitioning away from fee-for-service may be beneficial in the big picture, reducing patient stay durations, costs of care, and penalties from payers, but the implementation process can be both time consuming and costly. Rather than facing extra fees and billing complications, the right software support system can ease the burdens of applying a new approach to billing and payment collection. View our archived webinar: How Sequence Can Help You Succeed in the Balance of Volume-based and Value-based Outcomes by Measuring these Four Pillars of Care Sequence Health specializes in meeting and maintaining the needs of medical practices and hospitals of all shapes and sizes, ensuring a simple transition for your needs. By streamlining the changeover, reducing paperwork, and saving time, our proprietary system can assist you in taking your healthcare into the future. When you’re ready to adopt value-based payments as a part of your practice, Sequence Health can make the process as easy and possible. Contact us today to learn more about our unique approach to medical innovation. Sequence Health Phone: 888.986.3638 Fax: 770.234.3815 Email: [email protected]
Sequence Health to Debut Improved Patient Relationship Management Solutions at ObesityWeek 2016 Written by web_developers on September 23, 2016. Posted in Manage. Sequence Health is attending ObesityWeek 2016 this October 31 through November 4, as an exhibitor for the first time under the new company name and will be debuting the improved Sequence patient relationship management platform and support services. As a member of the American Society for Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery (ASMBS), Sequence Health is proud to continue providing bariatric practices better ways to attract more leads, convert more patients to surgery, and track the end-to-end patient experience. With 15 years of proven experience in improving outcomes for both patients and bariatric practices, Sequence Health is excited to share the streamlined patient engagement tools with colleagues across the industry. “With our new Sequence software platform and suite of complementary services, we are well positioned to help our clients achieve their goals in terms of volume growth, efficiency gains, and better patient outcomes,” said CEO John Richmond. Sequence Health will be located in Booth #726. REGISTER FOR THE OCTOBER 13TH WEBINAR: Meet New Core Standards for MBSAQIP Accreditation with Solutions from Sequence Health for a brief overview of the new MBSAQIP accreditation standards in effect as of October 1, 2016. About Obesity Week 2016 ObesityWeek is an international trade event focused on the basic science, clinical application, surgical intervention and prevention of obesity. Obesity Week will be held in New Orleans at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center for the third year in a row. The conference offers attendees a comprehensive agenda including over 100 sessions covering topics that include obesity surgery, prevention, research, public policy and more. To schedule an appointment to meet with Sequence Health in booth #726 during ObesityWeek 2016, call 888.986.3638 or complete our online contact form.
Know Your Earning Potential with Bundled Payments and Value-based Care Written by web_developers on September 15, 2016. Posted in Orthopedics. The increase in value-based care initiatives tied to bundled payments indicates big changes in the healthcare industry that affect the way patients receive care and providers measure success. As technology and medicine continue to advance, so does the way doctors engage patients to create meaningful relationships resulting in better patient outcomes. Traditionally in the United States, payment for healthcare treatment has been based on a fee-for-service model – the more patients receiving service, the more reimbursement for the provider, but that model is quickly changing. Hospitals, practices, and even clinicians are now paid according to value-based care reimbursement models. Quality and outcome standards are used to determine pay rates in response to a need for care that improves health rather than demands services. Organizations, and even individuals, are rewarded for meeting target costs and improving patient satisfaction and outcomes, while penalties are assessed for those unable to meet standards set by CMS. Sequence Health offers a suite of solutions allowing doctors and patients alike to benefit from new standards in efficient care delivery, effective patient experiences, and payment models that make sense under today’s value-based care programs. What Is Value-Based Care? Historically, doctor’s services are charged on a per-procedure or appointment basis. As such, many doctors feel pressured to perform a long list of procedures and tests that may or may not be necessary. In time, this cycle leads to longer patient hospital stays, more patients at one time, and often unnecessary ancillary testing. Instead of putting pressure on healthcare providers to perform potentially-needless procedures, value-based care focuses on medical decisions with the patient’s health and best interests in mind. When properly incorporated, this approach to medical treatment can ultimately reduce visit frequency and in-patient procedures while increasing satisfaction, rewards, and patient-reported outcomes. CMS Leads the Transition to Value-based Care For facilities that work with Medicare, complying with value-based mandates may or may not be required by CMS, or Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. CMS currently oversees a number of value-based bundled payment models, including CJR that affects orthopedic practices in 67 different regions across the country, and will be rolling out the new MACRA incentive-based payment system in 2017. Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement (CJR) Commonly known as CJR, Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement seeks to address one of the most common orthopedic inpatient procedures for Medicare patients: knee and hip replacements. Designed in an effort to standardize quality and cost of care, CJR replaces fees for related services with a bundled payment method, regulating the procedure, recovery duration, and more. Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) Passed in 2015, the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act, or MACRA, is an incentive-based payment system to be associated with Medicare services. Utilizing two tracks for payment, Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS), and Alternative Payment Models (APMs), MACRA is intended to replace three existing quality reporting systems with a streamlined, more effective alternative. Leveraging the Sequence Platform By treating healthcare technology as a tool, not an industry, it’s possible to increase quality of care while reducing paperwork and honing the focus on paying for what works rather than what can increase billing. Sequence Health can streamline this transition, easing the workflow impact of physician teams and making workflow management, patient engagement, and care plan adherence painless. With our unique technology related to hospital and provider management, our suite of solutions alleviate your burden, increase efficiencies, and simplify your care team’s day-to-day routine. Are you prepared to deliver and document value-based care to ensure you maximize your earning potential under reimbursement models that feature bundled payments? Contact Sequence Health today to learn more!
Five Patient Engagement Statistics You Can’t Afford to Ignore Written by web_developers on August 11, 2016. Posted in Manage. Healthcare providers are looking for ways to improve patient satisfaction and outcomes without adding to the heavy burden felt by their care teams to add time consuming processes to the daily to-do list. The statistics below make a strong case for incorporating educational outreaches and reminder engagements to set and manage patient expectations and strengthen the patient-provider relationship. 1. A 2022 study on patient engagement statistics showed that using patient engagement software can help reduce hospital readmissions by up to 14%. What are you doing to keep your patients engaged throughout their healthcare journey? Proper patient engagement can drive follow-ups, ensure patient satisfaction, and improve healthcare outcomes. 2. Text message reminders have a 98% open rate, making it one of the most powerful patient engagement tools. Patients can directly reply to the text message reminder to confirm, reschedule, or cancel an appointment. Automated patient outreaches and reminders simplify communication by minimizing no-shows and cancellations. What can you do to improve attendance rates and enhance efficiency? Read More: Why Patient Engagement Is Important In Healthcare 3. The latest patient experience statistics show that 63% of patients prefer telehealth visits to in-person consultations. Telehealth expands healthcare beyond the office and improves patient engagement via digital tools like video conferencing, remote patient monitoring, and SMS. It also enhances patient activation, allowing patients to participate actively in their care journey. What are you doing to help your patients access care beyond clinical settings? 4. A 2021 study showed that over 50% of patients do not adhere to their prescribed health plan due to poor or inadequate patient engagement. In addition, about 70% of medication-related hospital readmissions are due to patients abandoning their health plans. Readmissions are due to unfavorable patient outcomes and can have costly financial implications. What are you doing to overcome gaps in care management and ensure your patients adhere to their health plans to avoid readmissions? 5. 52% of patients missed a scheduled appointment in the past year. About 33% of patients who missed their scheduled healthcare appointments did so because they forgot. Automated appointment reminders can help boost healthcare patient engagement and maintain communication, reducing no-show rates and cancellations. What is your practice doing to ensure patients do not miss their scheduled medical visits? Hayley Kenslea, Director, Product Management Hayley ensures that our technology delivers for clinicians, patients, and systems by coordinating the work of our technical teams and client services. Our product knowledge expert and workflow engineer for Pathways and Call Center services, she joined Sequence Health with almost 10 years of experience in physician practice management, workflow re-engineering, and EMR and BI optimization. Hayley earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology & Global Health from Emory University and a Master’s in Healthcare Administration from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Visit https://www.sequencehealth.com to learn more about patient engagement solutions from Sequence Health. Connect with us on social media using the hashtags #SmarterEveryStepOfTheWay, #PatientEngagement, and #HealthIT.
EMRs Still Leaving Functional Gaps For Users, Survey Says Written by web_developers on July 14, 2016. Posted in Manage. A study conducted by the Veteran Affairs Center for Innovations in Quality, Effectiveness and Safety recently found that 43% of over 2500 primary care providers nationwide reported using workarounds in addition to or instead of their EMR-based workflows for managing vital patient data like test results. While the results of this study are nothing new, and in fact follow many years of reports of providers relying on paper-based workflows, this new study did provide some additional insight into WHEN and WHY providers turn to pen and paper. The study found that WHEN providers reported Limited Administrative Assistance, they were more likely to report using workarounds. Also, WHEN a provider reported that she or a colleague had personal experience missing important patient data in the past, they were more likely to rely on workarounds, presumably to ensure it didn’t happen again. An in-depth review of rationale for WHY providers used workaround utilization yielded three main reasons: AS A MEMORY AID Though providers are accustomed (sometimes too much so) to the continuous beeps and buzzes of medical devices, EMRs lack the ability for users to set their own future alerts or reminders in a way that makes tracking easier. While an EMR has the ability to display hundreds of patient records spanning years and years of care, EMRs do not surface the context-specific highlights of that dense data, leaving providers on their own to manage their specialty-specific, patient-specific or day-specific “To Do” lists elsewhere – like on a Post-It. FOR IMPROVED EFFICIENCY Changes happen fast. Patients can become ill, need intervention, and escalate from urgent to emergent in a matter of minutes. The fast pace of technology and patient care makes a clunky, slow documentation system virtually unusable. Shortcuts that smart enable decision support, quick action, and accurate and timely exchange of information are simply not available within EMRs today, resulting in workarounds like provider-to-provider texts, vital signs jotted down on gurney sheets, and other “quick and dirty” methods of communication. FOR FACILITATING CARE COORDINATION Additionally, any note communicated in a patient record in the EMR is auditable under HIPAA and other patient care regulations, so the documentation of those internal provider-to-provider or provider-to-self reminders in the EMR are often specifically discouraged. At the same time, due to the same regulations, documentation of patient information is also discouraged OUTSIDE of the EMR, in more unsecured formats such as email. Without a designated place to communicate these notes, it is no wonder providers turn to paper and pen. The researchers concluded that innovations are still needed to provide a solution suite that will meet the needs of care providers. Find out how Sequence eases the functional gaps left behind by EMRs by attending our next webinar on Thursday, August 11 at 2 PM EST. Register today! Hayley Kenslea, Director, Product Management Hayley ensures that our technology delivers for clinicians, patients, and systems by coordinating the work of our technical teams and client services. Our product knowledge expert and workflow engineer for Pathways and Call Center services, she joined Sequence Health with almost 10 years of experience in physician practice management, workflow re-engineering, and EMR and BI optimization. Hayley earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology & Global Health from Emory University and a Master’s in Healthcare Administration from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Tech Talk and Summer Reading Highlights with Chief Technology Officer, Gopi Yeleswarapu Written by web_developers on July 6, 2016. Posted in Other. A few weeks ago Bill Gates published his reading list on his blog. My boss mentioned about the book How Not to be Wrong, by Jordan Ellenberg, and suggested that I may like reading it. Here are my thoughts on workflow automation and the challenges of improving the user experience. 5 Books to Read This Summer Here in Seattle, summer is a gift you earn by gutting out nine months of rain and gloom. The skies are clear, there’s…www.gatesnotes.com Reading the book, you will understand why Bill Gates would have added to his list of books to read. Having spent the last dozen years writing software to automate routine tasks and building platforms, I have realized that math has a profound impact on computing, especially automation. In my opinion automating user workflows is one of the fairly challenging computing problems to solve. Identifying use cases and building rules on what needs to happen next and how, involves a lot of common sense logic applied like mathematical deductions (deduction theorem). At work, one problem my team and I are working on solving is to apply “if this, then that” rules to automate tasks while taking into account “when and by whom.” Come to think of it, these rules are pure math and if improperly applied can cause chain and circular rule executions leading to infinity. So taking atomic transactions (derivative) and applying limits (not tending to infinity, maybe 10 for now) is helping us solve the problem of workflow automation, while limiting the number of rules one can execute on a successful completion of a transaction. The chapter Straight Locally, Curved Globally has really been an inspiration while working on this project over the last few weeks. Gopi Yeleswarapu Chief Technology Officer at Sequence Health Gopi joined the Sequence Health team in 2014 with more than 10 years’ experience in developing complex software and support platforms. Since his arrival, he has led development of our software platform, Sequence, while managing development and support of the existing LeadTracker platform and all other internal IT projects. He spent the majority of his career building scalable, communication enabled and automation oriented software platforms for Healthcare and Telecom. Gopi earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science from Osmania University in India, and a Master’s in Computer Information Systems from the University of South Alabama.
Part 2: Is Your Care Coordination Solution Improving Patient Reported Outcomes — And Bottom Line? Written by web_developers on June 14, 2016. Posted in Manage. Part 2 of a 2-part series In Part 2, we will dive deeper into how the care coordination principles discussed in part 1 have been shown to boost practices’ bottom lines, and specific strategies aligned with each area. In our last post about this topic, Is Your Care Coordination Solution Improving Patient Reported Outcomes – And Bottom Line? We discussed the demand for care coordination and the basic tenets of the term. We also uncovered an important business opportunity that lies within the appropriate implementation of care coordination measures – the positive impact that such measures can have on a practice’s bottom line. So how, then, can your practice achieve some of these net-positive outcomes by improving your care coordination? 1. Deliberately organizing patient care activities enables consistency in process and reduction of waste and delay that is often accompanied by unnecessary variability. Historically, standardization has had negative connotations in care delivery, because every patient has a unique history and every provider strives to be sensitive to that when constructing a care plan. The most successful organizations define a best-fit care pathway and manage patients along that path, documenting variances as they occur and continuously re-assessing both resulting outcomes and financial performance. Reducing internal variability in the care process positions the patient for consistently better outcomes, and the hospital organization for sustainable success. 2. Sharing pertinent, contextual patient care information among all care team members allows directed decision-making. The best communications have both a timely delivery and a human touch. Enabling automated communications, like a message to a patient letting them know their request for appointment has been processed, provides the quick feedback that consumers and patients crave in today’s fast-paced world. And empowering providers to make informed person-to-person communicates, by alerting or reminding them to call a patient who indicated they may not be feeling well, ensures that both the provider and the patient get the most out of their conversation, and all goals and needs are met. 3. The best care pathway is crafted using patient-specific data to uniquely tailor the care experience. Early identification of patient risk acts as a trigger point or evaluation that enables a level of care matched most appropriately to a level of risk, ensuring your most intensive resources are best targeted towards the most acute patients. This allows for the “sweet spot” between care standardization and care personalization to be achieved. 4. Patient information is used to provide optimal appropriate and effective care to the patient. Actionable data points are collected, secured, and readily available for monitoring care delivery performance, quality and outcomes performance. What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get improved, and as the USDHHS states, “collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and acting on data for specific performance measures allows health care professionals to identify where systems are falling short, to make corrective adjustments, and to track outcomes.” These measures can be hard to track in a global EMR when they are often changing – like Patient Reported Outcomes which are tested, validated and published in new versions frequently. Leveraging these principles best positions organizations for outcomes success and financial success, but it is difficult to do within the constraints of the EMR. Increasingly, providers must turn to a more agile solution for the results they need, and few solutions offer the agility or user-friendly patient experience to produce results and help you seamlessly track and manage them. A single platform that enables increased practice efficiency, improved outcomes and decreased cost at every step of the care process will help to ease these common practice management and care improvement pains. Is your care coordination and outcomes management process saving your team time and money? Contact Sequence Health to learn how you can optimize the care coordination process using the Sequence platform and our support services including the NurseLine and Medical Call Center. Hayley Kenslea, Director, Product Management Hayley ensures that our technology delivers for clinicians, patients, and systems by coordinating the work of our technical teams and client services. Our product knowledge expert and workflow engineer for Pathways and Call Center services, she joined Sequence Health with almost 10 years of experience in physician practice management, workflow re-engineering, and EMR and BI optimization. Hayley earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology & Global Health from Emory University and a Master’s in Healthcare Administration from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Four Keys to Successfully Rebranding Your Healthcare Marketing Efforts Written by web_developers on June 2, 2016. Posted in Connect. “It’s a good thing to be forced to be innovative,” Avice Meehan, Senior Vice President, Chief Communications Officer, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Innovation in the way outcomes are achieved and measured within the healthcare industry is forcing companies to rethink how they approach healthcare marketing efforts. As healthcare companies are looking for a way to fill gaps in their existing technology, the MDnetSolutions leadership team realized we had a competitive advantage in the race to provide relationship and workflow management technology to care teams looking to improve and document quality care. After two years of intensive product development, market research, and internal upgrades, we have a new identity and a new message to share. MDnetSolutions is now Sequence Health. See our brand come to life as we walk through the four keys to a successful rebrand. Embrace your past, know your place in the market and define the cornerstone of your foundation. With 12 years’ experience supporting patient engagement, lead tracking, and patient care compliance for bariatric health providers, we already had the foundation to answer the urgent demands for patient management technology. LeadTracker, our flagship patient management software, along with our digital marketing, Medical Call Center, and NurseLine support services, allowed providers to grow their business and track a patient’s journey through the steps of care. Our vision was always to enhance the patient and provider relationship. The new challenge: to take this vision beyond the bariatric service line. Understand why there is a need for change and define your new value proposition. The Need for Change: Healthcare companies, from the enterprise level to private practices, and the service providers catering to them, have been affected by shifts in the healthcare industry. Greater transparency in communication and care delivery is a result of the new demand for accountability for both the provider and the patient who has an increasingly important decision-making role in their quality of care. As technology continues to evolve and care teams are connected by interoperable systems there is a high demand for solutions that connect the data points and capabilities of expansive platforms currently in place. Electronic medical record (EMR) systems gather data, but often lack the context and capability to promote real-time updates to the patient’s steps of care. Our Solution: That is where the original concept behind LeadTracker came into play for MDnetSolutions. The dashboard gave care team members a high-level view of their patient population as well as individual views of each patient’s progress through a care pathway. This platform, along with the MDMessenger feature capable of sending and receiving automated engagements, successfully enhanced efficiency and compliance throughout the steps of care. The value proposition was in high demand in service lines beyond MDnetSolutions’ bariatric clients. Although LeadTracker couldn’t meet the growing demands across the healthcare industry, a more robust platform would offer the same value proposition, allowing clients to enhance the technology they already use, maximizing the return on their IT investments. Invest in your people and your solutions, realizing your full potential. Two years of intensive product development, including the acquisition of Care Transition Systems IVR survey delivery service, and the expansion of MDnetSolutions internal talent team, allowed the company to grow to meet demand. The right people, with the right talent and unbridled passion for exceeding expectations came together to create an end-to-end solution. The new Pathways platform and messaging capabilities, along with a la carte support services including the NurseLine, Medical Call Center and agency-style Digital Marketing and Creative departments, gave the team a way to test the market and fine tune the capability to exceed demands. What did our market research reveal? Our new platform and growing support services no longer looked like the MDnetSolutions our clients and partners knew. We were better. We evolved. Through a sequence of deliberate events, we rose to meet the demands of healthcare providers outside of our original scope, providing smart solutions to service lines including orthopedic and cardio. Share your new message, identifying the value of your history and the vision of your new brand. We are Sequence Health, and we are smarter every step of the way. Sequence Health now offers a streamlined end-to-end patient engagement and care coordination solution that can stand alone or work in tandem to support existing technology. We provide best-in-class support services to enhance our IT solutions, allowing our clients to thrive at the crossroads of innovation and intervention. We are truly smarter every step of the way. More importantly, our new vision is to ensure that our clients are equipped with patient engagement and care coordination tools to promote healthy outcomes that are also smarter every step of the way. For more insight into industry trends and how Sequence Health is addressing the demands for innovations across the healthcare industry, call today. 888.986.3638 Sign up for our Live Webinar to participate in a demo of the Sequence platform and learn more about smart patient engagement solutions from Sequence Health. Follow us on social media by using the hashtag #WeAreSequence and tell us how you are making the patient experience #SmarterEveryStepoftheWay.
Is Your Care Coordination Solution Improving Patient Reported Outcomes – And Bottom Line? (Part 1) Written by web_developers on April 26, 2016. Posted in Manage. The term care coordination is becoming increasingly prevalent in every aspect of health IT, from HIPAA to patient satisfaction. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality defines care coordination as: “Care coordination involves deliberately organizing patient care activities and sharing information among all of the participants concerned with a patient’s care to achieve safer and more effective care. This means that the patient’s needs and preferences are known ahead of time and communicated at the right time to the right people, and that this information is used to provide safe, appropriate, and effective care to the patient.” Few would argue about the importance of the concepts noted above, and the potential positive impact those can have on both quality of care and patient outcomes. What the success some early adopters of value-based programs shows us, though, is that improved care coordination can also result in better business outcomes for physicians and practices. While fee-for-service payment methodologies remain a stronghold, to many providers it may seem counterintuitive to redesign care processes for the smaller percentage of payments driven by quality, or value. By choosing the right care coordination tactics, though, practice improvements can be made that positively impact outcomes regardless of specific payment methodology in question. So how, then, can your practice achieve some of these net-positive outcomes by improving your care coordination? First, let’s discuss some of the specific aspects of care coordination that positively impact patient reported outcomes. Deliberately organizing patient care activities – Using proven evidence-based clinical protocols, and layering in the necessary administrative steps through which a patient must be managed – registration, appointment scheduling and attendance, and billing and accounting – enables consistency in care delivery and reduction of waste and delay that is often accompanied by unnecessary variability. Sharing information among all participants concerned with a patient’s care – a shared, meaningful and contextual view allows providers to make quick, informed decisions on patient care and communicate all pertinent details to colleagues on the care team, providing an accurate view of patients’ progress in real time. Patients’ needs and preferences are known ahead of time and communicated at the right time to the right people – Patients are assessed early and often on a number of different facets, and their response data is used to uniquely tailor their care experience to their needs and manage their risk at the most appropriate level. Patient information is used to provide safe, appropriate, and effective care to the patient – Actionable data points are collected, secured, and readily available for monitoring care delivery performance, quality and outcomes performance, and more. Selecting cost-effective, achievable measures to track your progress towards your care coordination goals will save time and money, allowing you to increase efficiency and improve patient-reported outcomes at every step of the care process. Care Coordination and Return on Investment As reimbursement models incorporating outcomes measures continue to take hold across all points of care delivery, the demand for dedicated care coordination solutions continues to grow. Whether you are a self-employed clinician or a hospital CFO, it is likely that one of your goals is to measurably improve patient outcomes, without incurring additional undue costs. The published return on investment for care coordination varies wildly, from a net-no-return to, in some cases, over 600 percent. Those models that have shown the most efficacy have emphasized patient and caregiver education, standardization of care protocols, multidisciplinary provider collaboration, and a focus on patient management particularly around care transitions and follow-up. Larger investment has not necessarily been shown to result in better return, but rather a more targeted approach towards a narrower patient population. In Part 2 of this blog series, we will explore this in more detail. Is your care coordination solution and patient outcomes management process saving your team time and money? Contact MDnetSolutions to learn how you can optimize the process through MDMessenger, Pathways, and our concierge services including our NurseLine and Medical Call Center. Or call us at 888.986.3638. Hayley Kenslea, Director, Product Management Hayley Kenslea ensures that our technology delivers for clinicians, patients, and systems by coordinating the work of our technical teams and client services. Our product knowledge expert and workflow engineer for Pathways and Call Center services, Hayley joined MDnetSolutions with almost 10 years of experience in physician practice management, workflow reengineering, and EMR and BI optimization. Hayley earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology & Global Health from Emory University and a Master’s in Healthcare Administration from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.