Client Background
The client is a prominent healthcare provider based in Florida, dedicated to delivering compassionate and coordinated chronic care services. With a strong commitment to preventive care and patient well-being. The client collaborates with multiple medical practices across the state to offer comprehensive and personalized care solutions.
Business challenges
The client was providing chronic care management services to the patient using Epic EHR software. While using the software, the client identified that it is difficult to keep the patient engaged throughout the treatment. Some of the challenges that the client faced are:
1. Inefficient care coordination between the care team members
The client’s existing EHR software lacked the functionality of secure communication between various care providers such as care team members, laboratory technicians, physicians, pharmacists etc. This disrupts the care coordination and ultimately resulted in reduced quality of care to the patients.
2. Difficulties in communicating with patients
For each patient, the client needs to make outcalls to the patients from their personal communication devices. That reduced the efficiency of care providers and also created difficulties in the documentation of the conversation notes.
3. Notifications for activities
Keeping the patient involved and completing the periodic clinical activities was a big challenge for the client. While doing this, the care provider was unable to notify the patient about the activities, which resulted in the patient missing scheduled activities.
4. Engaging the patient with a treatment plan
Due to the absence of features such as sending educational material care plan reports, the client was facing difficulties in engaging patients with a treatment plan. This affected patient satisfaction and obtained expected health outcomes.
Solution
To overcome the issues and achieve better health outcomes for patients, the client has approached Medarch Inc. for eCareMD's Chronic Care Management software . Our team of business analysts and subject matter experts took multiple interaction calls and demonstrations to understand the client’s exact requirements. Upon receiving approval from the client, we implemented the eCareMD software in their practice.
After the implementation of the eCareMD software in practice, the client has experienced an increased patient satisfaction rate and better health outcomes due to the improved communication facilities of the eCareMD software.
Solution Highlights
There are various features that eCareMD software provides. Some of the key features that helped the client to overcome the issue are;
1. Secure Chat functionality
Continuous interaction between the care team members and care providers plays a crucial role in delivering effective, preventive, coordinated care to the patients. Our eCareMD software has helped clients to interact with care providers using the chat functionality within the platform. Using this functionality, care providers were able to communicate in real time by sending text messages regarding the patient's progress, scheduled appointments, clinical reviews, etc.
This has helped care providers make informed decisions about the patient profile and deliver coordinated care to obtain expected health outcomes.
2. Instant calls and call schedular functionality
Keeping the patient engaged is crucial and sometimes difficult for care providers because of the prolonged duration of the treatment. The eCareMD software’s functionality of making instant calls and scheduling recurring calls to the patient helped care providers to communicate with them whenever required.
Using this functionality, care providers were able to schedule recurring calls with patients for daily, weekly, or monthly clinical reviews, prescription refills, and evaluation of patient health using assessment, etc.
This functionality has improved the patient’s engagement with the treatment plan and confidence as they are able to communicate with care team members continuously.
3. Real-time notifications
The eCareMD software’s notification feature helps patients prevent missing scheduled activities by the care providers. The software allows care providers to set reminders in the form of SMS and email and push notifications to the patients at specified intervals. This reminder notifies patients before the scheduled activity time. Reminders for scheduled or canceled calls, appointments, prescription reminders, daily, weekly, or monthly clinical reviews, etc., will be sent to patients, which results in increased activity attention and completion rate of the patient.
4. Educational materials
Patients must be aware of chronic conditions they have and the impacts of those on their bodies. The eCareMD software’s send educational material feature helped clients to create educational materials for diverse chronic conditions, store them in a folder, and assign them to the respective patient needs. It helped patients to know details about the chronic conditions, lifestyle recommendations to be followed, benefits and impacts of medication adherence, etc. It helped in obtaining the expected health outcomes of the patients.
Value Delivered
1. Improved care coordination and quality of care
The real-time chat functionality helped care providers to interact more about clinicals of patients, send laboratory results, take updates about medications, etc. It helped care providers to understand the patient’s health status and make informed decisions accordingly.
2. Improved patient engagement
Using the call scheduler functionality, the care providers were able to make instant calls to the patients and schedule recurring calls for activities like periodic clinical reviews, prescription reminders, and virtual consultations. It results in achieving patient confidence and engagement with the treatment plan.
3. Reduced missing scheduled activities
The notifications feature helped patients to be aware of upcoming scheduled activities and ultimately reduced the missing of scheduled activities. This on-time completion of activities resulted in better health outcomes for the patient.
4. Increased patient confidence and treatment adherence
Using the eCareMD software, the client has shared educational materials with the patient. That results in a better understanding of chronic conditions to the patients and lifestyle recommendations to be followed for them. Ultimately, treatment adherence and patient confidence increased.