Push Real-Time Clinical Messaging
All healthcare providers and payers have intrinsically known for years the impact and importance that effective communication can have on quality of care. But for some reason, it hasn’t always worked as well as it should.
Primary care physicians have their challenges in communicating with specialists (including hospitalists). Physicians and nurses don’t always talk as frequently as would be ideal. Patients don’t always do their part in asking for clarity when they don’t fully understand a diagnosis, medications or hospital discharge instructions. Transition planning between hospital, social worker and post-acute care facility often lacks the interaction needed to make it most effective. And health plans and physicians don’t always adequately communicate where case management issues and chronic care are concerned.
Fortunately, much of that is changing and one tool leading that change is real-time clinical messaging. Through this, providers can be notified in real time and at point of care of the recommended clinical procedures most advantageous to the patient. The messages can come directly from outside sources such as health plans, TPAs, IPAs, ACOs, or HIEs or can also be generated internally based on payer’s business protocols.
Studies have shown that such real-time messaging significantly improves quality of care and allows for better results of disease management, resulting in fewer hospitalizations and reducing serious medical errors. Clinical messaging has also been shown to increase compliance with HEDIS and NCQA scores (and thus improve “Star Ratings”) through its ability to accurately capture all of the needed HEDIS preventative care measures.
The best clinical messaging programs are integrated with a provider’s practice management software to allow for direct interaction between the provider’s office and a health plan’s case manager. Such coordination provides for the electronic two-way transfer of documents between the physician and the health plan while allowing the case manager to communicate in real time with the provider’s office while the patient is present.
As healthcare reform strives to make access to care more affordable and understandable, it is more important than ever for physicians to engage electronically and to embrace this kind of online communication with both payers and their patients. An era of accountable care and population health management will demand it. And clinical messaging is only a start.
An increasing number of physician offices are now enabling patients to schedule, cancel or change an appointment online. Patients can also request medication refills, view lab results and keep track of their entire medical records through online communication and access. And why not? Just as physicians increasingly embrace electronic medical records, it is only natural that patients would want secure, easy access to this information as well so they can help monitor their own health, ask the right questions, and make better informed healthcare decisions.
Online communication is not intended to take the place of an office visit when that is required. But patients can save a lot of time, money and hassle by being able to communicate securely with their physician’s office online, particularly when it comes to routine questions or administrative needs. And such communication greatly benefits the physician as well as it allows him/her to spend more time with their patients in the office or the hospital, and less time handling routine tasks.
Electronic communication linking providers, payers and patients is fast becoming a necessity in regards to office efficiencies and responding to patient demands. In fact, physicians who fail to communicate with their patients in this manner, or who fail to embrace such quality-oriented tools as real time clinical messaging, may soon find that they have no patients at all.
Brian O’Neill is the chief executive officer of Office Ally.
