Author: web_developers

We’re thrilled with the excitement and recognition that MDPathways has received. Our new patient engagement and management platform recently debuted at conferences from California to Chicago to Puerto Rico — creating a buzz at ASMBS ObesityWeek 2015, SHSMD Connections by the American Hospital Association, and the Puerto Rico Hospital Association’s 2015 Convention. MDPathways is pioneering change in patient engagement and challenging the healthcare industry as a whole.

To best explain these achievements, and bring you up to speed whether you’ve seen us at a recent show, have participated in a demo, or are even one of our inaugural users, here is a Q&A with those closest to the development of this patient engagement product — Gopi Yeleswarapu and Hayley Kenslea.

First tell us a bit about your role in this project.

Gopi Yeleswarapu: As Chief Technology Officer, I’m responsible for planning the new product development; hiring software development teams and setting up the product development process; building the cloud infrastructure on Microsoft Azure; and managing budgets and leading software development towards the successful development and release of this product.

Hayley Kenslea: My role is Director of Product Management, so I work to ensure the end users are happy with the tool. “Happy” means many things – can users understand how to use the tool? Do they know where to find things while logged in? And is the overall look and feel (what we call the User Interface) fresh and inviting?

So exactly what is MDPathways?

H: It’s a tool that helps users — from front-line staff, to clinicians and managers — to better manage patients throughout a care process, ultimately allowing them to understand, anticipate, and react to trends in their programs.

G: From a technical perspective, it is cloud based software as a service (SaaS) platform that integrates with EMRs, PMSs, CRMs and other automation systems in addition to facilitating two-way communications via email, phone calls and text messages to deliver the best possible patient outcomes.

What was the push for creating MDPathways?

G: MDPathways is a brand new upgrade and complete refresh of our proprietary Patient Engagement and Management system, LeadTracker. In this new Avataar, LeadTracker has been transformed from a web based application to a cloud based SaaS platform designed to streamline workflow throughout a practice’s care continuum; help eliminate the risk of data inaccuracies; and engage patients one on one to help providers deliver the best possible outcomes.

What are the top 3 successes of this product?

H: The updated look and feel; the improved reports (no more downloading Charts & Reports on your local desktop); and the speed and more intuitive layout — I could talk about how great MDPathways is for days! Oh, and its integration abilities mean we can feed data directly into or out of MDPathways, which decreases the risk of duplicate data entry and error on behalf of our users.

G: First I’d like to answer this with a quote from Eugene Pototsky, Lead Engineer and Architect who has been instrumental in the design and development of MDPathways SaaS platform development: “The biggest success is the chance to be pioneers of a complex solution within the healthcare industry. This multilateral product required us to develop for all aspects of the care continuum — we needed to create a simple and straight forward user interface (UI) for patients; a functional-rich UI for hospital users; and both of those required the support of a complex, customizable backend platform.” It is truly remarkable.

From my perspective, the biggest successes have been: 

1. Building a ubiquitous software platform that is ready for the new healthcare challenges.
2. A clean user interface that will help our clients manage their patients efficiently and always know what a particular patient’s needs are. That in turn has a potential to help those patients achieve their goals for a healthy life.
3. Setting up a repeatable process to continue improving the product to provide powerful new features. 

What has been the biggest challenge with the MDPathways development?

G: Aside from vetting the proper technology to build the product, and recruiting a team able to plan, design and develop, one of the biggest challenges was delivering the product on-time. This, by far, was the most arduous task because we had to maintain a fine balance between prioritizing product features that would enhance usability with making sure we could deliver the full product within the originally planned timeline.

H: We have many different profiles of user — call center, nurses, doctors, non-clinical staff — so feeling like we accurately addressed each of those users’ priorities was tough to balance.

How are the trial users responding to the new product?

G: It’s still early but we are already receiving positive feedback from our newly on-boarded clients as well as prospective clients that have seen our product demos. Our sales and on-boarding teams are doing an awesome job with their product evangelism!

H: Users — call center, nurses, doctors, staff, everyone — love the look and feel, and easy flow of information throughout the tool.

Looking ahead, what new developments and improvements do you expect for MDPathways?

H: Users always want to see graphical representations of data trends so we’ve already added a lot of updates for the Reports function into the development pipeline. We also have a lot of new features around automating updates in MDPathways from an integrated EMR or PMS to continually improve and streamline workflows.

G: This next big upgrade to our patient engagement and management platform actually launches in a few days — we’re integrating a pre-configured patient intake form portal that will allow patients to report about their health. This will help maintain accurate patient data for our clients. We’re also meeting this week to prioritize several new features like integration with EMRs, appointment schedulers, advanced automation and other features that can help clients, as well our own teams, efficiently manage and engage with patients.

Thanks to you both for taking the time to chat with us, and a huge congratulations to you and the rest of your teams on such a radical development in the healthcare industry!

When a patient is discharged from a hospital, the discharge planning nurse should probably end the conversation with the patient by saying, “Best wishes and we will see you in a couple of weeks.”

One in five elderly patients makes a return trip to the hospital less than a month after initial discharge. Called the revolving door syndrome in a report conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, titled Care About Your Care, the frequent return trips to the hospital come with a $26 billion price tag annually for Medicare patients. The report goes on to say 65 percent of the total cost could be prevented if hospitals tweaked their system of care.

Too often patients do not comprehend the doctor’s instructions prior to leaving the hospital. The end result is poor medication adherence and failure to get the proper follow-up care.

A key to cutting down the number of readmissions is to identify patients most at risk of returning to the hospital. It is impossible to have a readmission program targeting every patient. Too much energy is wasted and the program is rendered ineffective.

Considering 80 percent of all readmissions come from 20 percent or less of the same patients, it is paramount hospitals identify those patients and implement programs to prevent readmissions.

An effective way of identifying high-risk readmissions is a health risk assessment (HRA) and continued communication with the patient to bolster patient engagement. MDnetSolutions has developed a digital HRA form that is easy to use and can be accessed online. HRAs can determine the current status of a patient’s health, estimate the level of health risk involved with a procedure, and more importantly, inform and provide feedback to patients via online reports.

The patient, or his or her caregiver, can access these online reports and continue the personalized care that hopefully will prevent the patient from returning to the hospital.

Identifying the Need for Intervention

In addition to MDnetSolutions’ HRA program, the Atlanta-based company also has increased its ability to help hospitals transform patient care and remain actively engaged with the patient following discharge by acquiring IVR Care transition Systems, which excels in providing support for patients making the transition from the hospital to home.

Using an interactive voice response telephone system and carefully developing surveys, or HRAs, members of the IVR care team, which is available to hospitals, gather vital information from the patients’ responses to the assessment.

These responses can identify early signs and symptoms of clinical problems or issues with medication adherence and the need for follow-up care after hospital discharge.

The results of the HRAs are sent to the healthcare team at the hospital on a daily basis, and if warranted, the healthcare professional will follow up with the patient with a phone call. This provides an opportunity to identify a problem before it turns into a serious condition, requiring a return trip to the hospital and costing both the patient and the facility money.

In the long run, using the patient engagement solutions created by MDnetSolutions is a win for patients, who receive quality, personalized healthcare and for the hospitals that save on patient readmissions.

Improved communication leads to higher patient satisfaction, and for healthcare providers who want to involve patients in their own care and form closer ties with consumers, now might be the best time in years to implement a patient portal solution.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reports 69 percent of U.S. adults track a health indicator for themselves or a loved one. The California HealthCare Foundation also reports, “Patients pay more attention and become more engaged in their health and medical care when they have easy access to their health information online.”

Although there is clear data supporting the need for providers to offer effective and user-engaging patient portals, many systems launched to date have fallen short of meeting patients’ needs.

At Sequence Health, we have worked with practices of every size to install an online patient portal enabling both the patient and the doctor to know, see and find vital patient information in one convenient location.

Our solution, which is HIPAA-compliant, is housed on your practice’s existing website or we can build you an entirely new website, including the patient portal. The portal is a convenient two-way street of communication between patient and provider. Both sides can view, store and record information, get lab results, schedule doctor appointments, refill medication, view a billing statement and easily communicate with one another in a private secure web-based system.

A patient portal is an engaging way to encourage patients to regularly access their information. It could be a routine like updating your Facebook status, “tweeting” on twitter or creating a “pin” on Pintrest.

These sites have one thing in common—users interact with the sites many times a day, returning multiple times to access new content. This type of engagement should be the ultimate goal for patient portals.

The portal is helping to alleviate follow-up phone calls to physician offices, allowing the practice’s staff to focus on taking care of patients who are in the office.

Overall, the most significant benefit of the portal is the opportunity to offer an accessible, effective engagement tool to patients and your community. Our patient portal is much more than just an online tool; it supports a strategy focused on enhancing patient engagement within our community and with our providers. The patient portal also can be an efficient and effective method of communicating with patients outside of the office.

However, the most pronounced portal benefit is the improvement in healthcare quality it encourages, stemming from patients’ active engagement in their own health and healthcare.

Don’t delay, contact a sales rep at Sequence Health today and let’s begin the engagement.

Donna Roach, CIO of Borgess Health/Ascension Health Information Services in Kalamazoo, Mich., helped contribute to this blog.