Category Archives: Blog

Terry Edwards

Managing the surprisingly troublesome impact of real-time healthcare on clinical decision-making

By Terry Edwards  /  08 Jun 2017

We live in an age of instant gratification. From the texts we send friends and family to the orders we place on Amazon.com, we’ve come to expect immediate results: instant responses, next-day shipping, etc.

The idea of immediacy in healthcare communications is not new. In fact, in 2015, healthcare analyst Gartner outlined a vision for what it dubbed the “real-time health system”—a landscape where healthcare professionals will be constantly aware of what’s happening within their systems and with their patients.

As a person living in the digital age, you’ve probably experienced real-time awareness in other parts of your life: the repetitive dings of received text messages, the intermittent beeps of calendar alerts, the near-constant hum as your smartphone vibrates over and over to let you know your mother, children and cousins have uploaded photos to Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. In fact, as I’m typing this piece, I’ve heard alerts for two personal text messages that I’ve yet to look at (the temptation is maddening), four work-related emails (that I did have to stop and look at), a notification that someone commented on a thread I replied to on Facebook and more.

While there’s definitely a benefit to each of us knowing what’s happening in our expanded universe in real time—and we can easily draw a direct line to the benefits that doctors, nurses and patients would experience if they could communicate instantaneously while coordinating care—the influx of information is simply overwhelming.

And when alarm fatigue sets in, important messages get missed, the communication cycle breaks down and what was once a valuable resource becomes a liability. Overwhelmed and inundated clinicians cannot optimally use their invaluable expertise to make effective clinical decisions that deliver great health outcomes.

Aggregating, analyzing and managing the distribution of clinical information

Managing the flow of data and alert fatigue is a real challenge that clinicians and the IT teams that support them need to understand. Clinicians need “just the facts, ma’am,” so to speak, and they need to know which set of facts pertain directly to them and the patients for whom they are caring. Receiving more than enough information is not always a good thing, especially when the situation calls for fast thinking and quick decisions.

Investments made in technologies implemented over the past several years have enabled healthcare as an industry to generate very large amounts of digitized clinical information. The challenge is to aggregate this patient data in real time to generate new knowledge about a patient and distribute it in a way that does not inundate the clinician recipients with unnecessary information. Physicians and nurses should receive information they need in order to act in that moment. Everything else is noise.

Implementing communication-driven workflows

Once new knowledge is made available and deemed relevant to a given clinical situation, it’s important to enable workflows that drive this information to the right care team members, who can take action in that moment. Hospital-based communication workflows must encompass all modalities, adhere to strict security mandates and facilitate reliable exchanges among clinicians across boundaries (e.g., acute, pre-acute and post-acute care settings). This kind of clinical integration is the future of healthcare communications.

If clinicians are inundated with unnecessary information, messages and alerts, combined with a communication workflow that creates barriers to a) finding the right care team member to contact, b) finding the contact method that the clinician prefers and c) knowing whether the intended recipient received the message, the workflow is flawed and is inhibiting the decision-making that leads to higher standards of patient care.

Leveraging clinical expertise

The personal judgment of experienced healthcare professionals is irreplaceable in effective, real-time decision-making. Technological advances are no doubt improving healthcare, but human intuition can never be replaced by a new device or software. However, that intuition can be inhibited by technologies if they are not strategically implemented and managed. In this sense, real-time healthcare could, ironically, be eroding quality.

To truly leverage the hundreds of collective years of clinical expertise housed in the minds of your hospital’s medical staff—the expertise that yields great outcomes—you must remove the barriers to effective communication. Collecting patient data in real time is an important part of that. But analyzing and aggregating that data into digestible, valuable pieces of information that can be easily shared and collaborated on is the follow-through that is often overlooked.

The gravitation toward instant gratification isn’t going away. And it’s important to understand that the concept doesn’t apply simply to generating patient data as healthcare events are occurring, but also to the ability to extract the significant portions and begin collaborating with the broader care team to interpret the data and derive a plan to deliver high-value care.

What to expect from MACRA: The early years

By Caitlin Greenbaum, Director of Health Policy & Strategy, The Health Management Academy   /  09 May 2017

MACRA legislation passed in April 2015. When the initial version of the rule came down, the industry collectively braced for declining revenues, the avalanche of administrative paperwork and the increase in overhead costs that would be required to comply.

When the final rule was issued in October 2016, the tempered requirements seemed to point toward fewer projected negative payment adjustments in 2019, the target year for MACRA’s first Quality Payment Program distributions, and the tension subsided a little.

Even with the new allowances in reporting and threshold scores, the MACRA structure makes clear that there’s an abundance of work to be done, especially around efforts to promote care coordination and communication.

Year 1: 2017-2018

Now that we’re already into 2017, the first official reporting year, tensions are rising again because, even though most physicians acknowledge they are going to participate, the majority have not yet plotted their course or defined a compliance strategy.

And if you’re in the group that hasn’t figured it all out yet, the good news is you’re not alone.

According to a recent poll conducted by The Health Management Academy, almost half of the physician and practice leaders who participated are not moving very quickly toward adopting value-based payment models. In fact, only 4% claimed to be moving “very quickly” while almost 40% admitted to moving “very slowly” toward value-based care.

Somewhat surprisingly, the same is true even for large hospital systems. These organizations are perceived to be the driving force, the ones moving the fastest toward the end goal of value-based care, and yet, per a similar poll, few of the large systems are moving very quickly.

Only 8% of large hospital systems polled are moving swiftly toward implementing value-based payment models. – The Health Management Academy, 2017

The Quality Payment Program, however, is going to be the catalyst for healthcare organizations, both large and small, moving more aggressively toward these models in the next couple of years.

The MACRA structure and how you fit in

By now, you know that reimbursements are going to be variable based on performance, even if you’re still practicing in a fee-for-service structure and, like most, have not yet begun practicing in the more advanced tracks.

There are four participation categories, which fall underneath two broad tracks—the Merit-based Incentive Payment System (MIPS) and Advanced Alternative Payment Model (APM) track.

The four MACRA Quality Payment Program participation categories. – The Health Management Academy, 2017

The two categories in the middle of the chart are bridge areas, and won’t apply to many providers right now, but they can be considered as stepping stones from MIPS to the Advanced APM track.

The MIPS track equates to fee‑for‑service, and most physicians will, at least initially, fall into this track. They’ll balance their steps toward embracing more downside risk by continuing to practice fee-for-service medicine, and so they must prepare to report performance metrics and have payments adjusted based on those metrics in 2019.

On the other end of the spectrum is the Advanced APM track. To reach “Advanced APM Qualifying Clinician” status, physicians must engage significantly in certain downside risk-bearing payment models. In this track, participating physicians will enjoy fewer reporting requirements and more financial incentives, while still being held accountable for delivering high-value care. The only way to sustain a profitable practice in this track is to eliminate wasteful workflows that result in inefficient and unreliable communication processes among all members of the broader care team, even if they are not directly affiliated with your practice.

Year 2: 2018-2019

In the first months of 2018, physicians practicing in the MIPS track—again, that will be most of you—will be required to report metrics in three performance categories based on at least 90 consecutive days of work. This should come as more good news, because if you haven’t started measuring yet, or you’re not impressed by your initial metrics, you still have time to pivot before the data is due in early 2018.

CMS will use that data to give each physician a composite score, which will determine the payment adjustment he or she receives in 2019.

The Quality Payment Program’s initially proposed rule was accompanied by disheartening projections in terms of payment adjustments, particularly for solo physicians and small practices. While the finalized October 2016-issued rule basically guaranteed that all physicians who submit any performance data will receive at least a neutral payment adjustment, physicians are still bracing themselves for less-than-average profit margins.

As MIPS is largely a budget-neutral program, less risk equals less reward. Since fewer physicians will be subject to negative payment adjustments in 2019 (see Image 3 below), fewer dollars will be available to distribute to those who perform well.

Only 20%—versus 87%—of physicians in smaller practices are projected to experience negative payment adjustments in 2019. – The Health Management Academy, 2017

Simply put, the best way to ensure your adjustment is as high as possible is to garner a high composite score.

Effectively coordinating care with your patients’ broader care teams as accurately and efficiently as possible to reduce waste and unnecessary overhead costs is a good first step toward achieving high scores in all four MIPS performance categories.

Back to the present

One of the goals of MACRA is to drive the costs out of treatment while still providing high-value care. Physicians will be in a much better position to deliver this dichotomy, and advance to a more rewarding reporting track, when the barriers to real-time care coordination have been broken down.

Seamless care team communication and collaboration among interdisciplinary, and often disparate, providers will be a foundation on which you can lay the groundwork for improved care coordination, which leads to less waste, improved efficiencies, and ultimately better outcomes, all of which underlie value-based care and the successful reduction of healthcare costs.

Source: “Making Sense of MACRA” webinar. The Health Management Academy and PerfectServe. March 2017. 

Watch the full webinar to learn even more about MACRA and how it applies to your practice.

Terry Edwards

The role of secure communications in your clinical integration strategy

By Terry Edwards  /  14 Apr 2017

If you could take one solution with you on your journey to clinical integration, what would it be?

Clinical integration is the unification of healthcare data, services and coordination across acute, outpatient and post-acute care. It portrays an environment where waste and inefficiency are all but eliminated from healthcare communications, costs decrease and care improves. It’s the future of medicine.

You wouldn’t be far off course if your first thought was to rely heavily on the EHR to support your clinical integration strategy. While the EHR is a valuable tool for sharing patient information within hospital systems and broader care networks, it lacks a fundamental quality that bridges the gaps between Meaningful Use and true clinical integration.

Fully realized clinical integration can only occur when the barriers of communication have been broken down, and interdisciplinary clinicians can accurately and reliably coordinate care in real time across organizational and geographical boundaries. As with most things related to healthcare communication and the sharing of information across disparate networks, securing those communications has been and will continue to be a primary focus for healthcare IT leaders. In an environment where healthcare organizations are driving toward an end-goal of clinical integration, enabling secure communications alone just isn’t enough.

To achieve clinical integration, clinicians need a solution that enables immediate, accurate, reliable and secure communications.

Immediacy in healthcare communication

Real-time communication is a crucial element of delivering high-value care. In the most critical emergencies, every second counts. The time that clinicians waste identifying the right on-call care team member to contact, and then trying to reach that person, can quite literally be the difference between life and death. Even in non-emergent situations, early detection and treatment are well-known effective preventers of worsening conditions.

Yet it’s all too common for inefficient and broken communication workflows to create time-consuming hurdles for clinicians to clear—sometimes even to just begin the conversation.

Clinically integrated settings approach clinician-to-clinician communication with a sense of real-time urgency. That’s not to say that every message should be sent with an emergency status, just that the process of identifying the provider you need to connect to and the delivery of that message should be seamless and immediate.

Reaching the right care team member on the first attempt should be an important metric for all hospital systems. To keep performance numbers high in this area, you must ensure clinicians always know exactly whom to contact for any given medical issue.

However, most clinicians today initiate time-sensitive contact to the broader care team by thumbing through a lengthy paper-based on-call schedule, making a call, and then waiting to receive a response.

Real-time clinical communication and collaboration tools immediately deliver secure communications, and even allow the clinician initiating the communication to see in real time when messages are delivered and read.

Contact accuracy

Reaching providers on the first attempt is important, but it’s just as important to reach the right provider—the one who can act on the medical issue at that moment—via his or her preferred method of contact.

It’s not uncommon for providers to have a different preferred contact medium for every variance of their schedule. And it’s not uncommon for those schedules to change at a moment’s notice. Yet many hospitals, in both small and large systems, only print the schedule and patient assignment lists once per day.

Clinicians in this setting have no way of knowing if they are accurately reaching out to the right providers via the right contact method. Manually producing a list of whom to contact and how is a process riddled with opportunity for inefficiency and inaccuracy.

Dynamic Intelligent Routing™ eliminates those opportunities for communication breakdown. A distinct capability of PerfectServe Synchrony®, Dynamic Intelligent Routing analyzes workflows, call schedules and contact preferences, enabling clinicians to reach the right person at the right time with just the tap of a button.

Reliable communication workflows

If your clinicians depend on inaccurate call schedules or outdated, cumbersome processes to drive clinical communications, your communication workflow isn’t reliable.

When clinicians can immediately contact the care team member they need via that provider’s preferred contact method, communication workflows become reliable and trustworthy, which leads to high adoption and improved patient care, no matter the care setting.

From improved care coordination to reduced costs

Inefficient communication workflows not only interfere with the realization of clinical integration, but also they inflate healthcare costs. For example, if a radiologist identifies a critical result in an outpatient test, the radiologist needs to contact the patient’s PCP so action can be taken right away. If the communication is not immediate, accurate or reliable, the process breaks down and the delay could result in medical complications for the patient that end up costing more to treat.

Moving a patient safely through the admissions, treatment, discharge and post-acute care processes requires a tremendous amount of coordination, good communication and a sound clinical integration strategy. The tools you use to support that communication and collaboration will play an important role in your success.

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Healthcare is Ripe for Tools to Enable Value-Based Collaborative Care

Terry Edwards

3 takeaways from HIMSS17

By Terry Edwards  /  28 Feb 2017

More than 41,000 healthcare IT and clinical leaders converged on Orlando last week for the annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition. This event generates a lot of industry buzz and, for some organizations, sets the stage for the year in terms of strategic focus and planning.

As I looked through the educational sessions offered in this year’s curriculum, I found it striking that nearly half of the 20 education tracks elevated the need for secure, real-time and reliable clinical communication and collaboration.

From “The Business of Healthcare and New Payment Models” track to the “Quality and Patient Safety Outcomes” track, attendees received an abundance of information pertinent to the strategic goals the industry will focus on in the year to come — goals that need a foundational infrastructure of secure clinical communications.

Here are three areas that I see most affected by the need for improved care team collaboration:

  1. Care coordination, value-based care and population health

The level of care coordination needed to successfully adapt to value-based payment models requires interdisciplinary clinicians to easily and securely communicate within — and beyond — the walls of the hospital. Regardless of affiliated organizations or geographical locations, these clinicians need instant access to the broader care team — and the patient — and they must have the ability to quickly send and receive critical PHI. This will enable hospitals and large systems not only to succeed in value-based care, but also to reduce costs and lay the necessary foundation for true clinical integration and population health.

(I talk more about this in my blog post “Healthcare is ripe for tools to enable value-based collaborative care” — read it here.)

  1. Technology, infrastructure and security

To achieve the level of care coordination required to truly address value-based payment models, organizations have to build a secure and compliant technological infrastructure that supports device standards and the communication protocols of the various workgroups that make up dynamic care teams.

Privacy, security and compliance will continue to be important objectives; the foundation of these objectives is an infrastructure that meets requirements without impeding communication and collaboration. This means automatically and seamlessly sharing information through mobile applications that are easy to use and easy to incorporate into existing workflows. Only then will we have tools that will achieve the levels of adoption necessary to make them truly impactful.

It seems like an arduous task, but it’s one we cannot shy away from.

  1. Analytics, process improvement and clinician engagement

As a result of the digitization that has occurred over the past decade, the industry has amassed a significant amount of clinical data. The farther we go down the road toward clinical integration and real value-based care, even more data will be created. To make lasting improvements and affect positive change, we have to harness this data and make it useful.

By gathering and analyzing data related to patient conditions and behaviors, intelligent decisions can be made automatically via technologies that reduce the cognitive load on clinicians by presenting only the information that is relevant to them and requires their actions. This will support value-based care and patient compliance and experience, as well as reduce costs by streamlining workflows and better engaging physicians.

In the same vein, HIMSS17 attendees were heavily focused on the topics of cognitive healthcare and actionable intelligence. Keynote speaker Ginni Rometty, CEO at IBM, spoke about this new era of medicine and challenged healthcare leaders to step up and “build this world.”

“We’re in a moment when we can actually transform pieces of healthcare. It’s within our power,” Rometty said during her HIMSS17 keynote. “This era that will play out in front of us can change the world for the better.”

The industry is changing at a speed that we haven’t seen before. This really is the time for healthcare leaders to make their voices heard and to take part in shaping the future healthcare landscape.

And it’s exciting to know that PerfectServe is in the thick of it with you — building a foundation of secure and immediate clinical communications across the broader care continuum that’s needed to achieve the goals discussed in the majority of the educational tracks at this year’s event.

Looking forward to seeing you all again next year.

HIMSS18
March 5-9, 2018
Las Vegas, Nevada

Terry Edwards

How much is your answering service really costing you?

By Terry Edwards  /  16 Feb 2017

The inevitable mistakes made by a traditional after-hours answering service aren’t often attributed to significant costs that may be undercutting the success of your practice. But if you consider that quality communication between members of your staff and your patients—especially after-hours—is a fundamental pillar of patient care and safety, you’ll start to see that little mistakes can add up to big costs.

Physicians and group practice administrators throughout the country will attest that answering services make mistakes that cause clinical communication breakdowns. The human error factor in the answering service equation means lost or delayed messages, wrong patient names, inaccurate symptom descriptions and more. For a long time, it’s simply been considered the status quo. There didn’t seem to be any real way around it.

So an industry-wide acceptance that on-call duty will be frustrating for physicians, and that mornings—especially Monday mornings—will always present some answering-service-related issues for the practice administrator to handle has taken hold. And while these inconveniences may not seem like a big red flag, it’s wise to get a good look at how far-reaching the impacts really are.

Are your patients getting the best care, even after hours?

Patients will generally stay loyal to a practice because they trust their doctor. But if they feel like their medical needs are not given the same sense of urgency that they’re feeling—or worse, if their questions go unanswered—that trust can quickly dissolve into frustration and fear. For some patients, despite their relationship with the physician, this can be a reason to leave the practice and find a new provider.

So, while you may or may not lose the recurring revenue of a loyal patient, you have to consider the cost of that patient’s negative experience.

If one patient has had an unsatisfying experience with your answering service, others probably have, too. So the real question becomes: how much is your answering service impacting patient satisfaction?

Are you spending your time the way you want?

It’s difficult to tie a hard cost directly to the frustration of wading through miscommunications to get to the bottom of an issue. And it might not be possible to calculate the profit margin impact of the feeling that you cannot deliver the level of patient care you want because there is a weak link in your communications process. But the time you spend managing answering service mistakes is time that could be spent on patient care, so the equally important consideration here is the quality of that time.

The time you spend feeling frustrated and inconvenienced—by non-emergency after-hours calls, for example—does have a cost. It’s a personal calculation and it has a real impact on physician satisfaction.

Are you at risk for fines, penalties or lawsuits?

Some unlucky practices have discovered one of the answering service industry’s best kept secrets: subcontracting.

Some of the answering services that exist today are actually not answering services at all. They are simply businesses that subcontract the work out to another answering service—one that may or may not adhere to HIPAA compliance standards. It’s a risk that no practice leader would knowingly take. With so many unknowns, a practice in this situation is at real risk for fines and other breach penalties.

And then consider this worst-case scenario: a patient unknowingly suffering a stroke calls after hours to report blurred vision and confusion; but because the answering service’s on-call schedules are not accurate, the patient’s message isn’t delivered to the correct on-call physician for another hour. At this point, given the time sensitivity of this issue, the practice could be at risk for a malpractice suit.

An incident like this—however unlikely it may be—could mean a tangible financial loss for your practice.

But that’s not all.

Are you protecting your reputation?

Imagine a critical care surgeon with his own practice who routinely performed emergent consults for local hospitals…until they stopped calling. The hospital felt his answering service was unable to deliver messages in a timely manner, and so they found other practitioners to fill that need.

Your credibility as a caregiver in your local healthcare community can be negatively affected if outside consultants and hospitals cannot reach you quickly in times of emergency. The professional impact of a tarnished reputation is beyond quantifiable. And if the reason is answering service communication delays, it’s also unacceptable.

Are you sure you’ve uncovered the hidden fees?

Most answering services are up front about their fees, but physician leaders and practice managers seldom realize how many fee-based activities they’re actually charged for on a single after-hours call:

  • There’s a fee for taking the message.
  • There could be a fee for relaying that message to the right clinician.
  • There could be another fee for relaying the clinician’s instructions back to the patient, if that’s the case.
  • There could be yet another fee for recording and logging the conversation as a whole, or a fee for recording and logging each communication.

These little fees can add up over time to a surprisingly significant amount.

Are you ready for a better solution?

We live in an era of digital clinical communication, with automated tools that eliminate human error in after-hours communication, provide caller ID protection for physician contact information, and have the ability to recognize and defer non-urgent messages until business hours resume.

Imagine an on-call weekend when non-urgent prescription refill messages are deferred until Monday and the physician’s days are spent as planned (i.e., enjoying time off unless there are true emergencies).

Imagine walking into the practice every morning knowing that all your patients received the care or assurance they needed after hours and there will be no complaints to handle.

You can take a hard look at your answering service’s monthly invoice to understand the hard costs, but those are not the only ones to consider. The less quantifiable effect on your patient safety and satisfaction levels, your physician satisfaction levels, your compliance risk and your professional reputation are serious issues you should consider—because they really do cost your practice.

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PerfectServe Synchrony™ is the modern, secure call management platform designed to give you greater control over your clinical communications.