Digital Transformation: 5 Technology Imperatives to Becoming a Data-Driven Organization
Technology supports providers and their ability to effectively serve patients. Data management and communication exchange solutions represent a technology category with enormous potential to help hospitals leverage existing data to meet the clinical, financial and care coordination needs of their patients.
Healthcare professionals have long relied upon siloed systems for their data management needs. Paper-based and manual processes hinder the ability to manage, harness and connect information for truly meaningful insights that can drive improved patient care and engagement. There has never been a better time for hospitals and health systems to leverage technology platforms that connect data and put it in the hands of providers who can use it for the betterment of patient care.
Vyne Medical’s easy-to-implement and easy-to-use Trace® platform is a healthcare-centric, integrated solution proven to do just that – connect disconnected data. Hundreds of hospitals are using Trace to drive improvements in data management through a technology platform that meets the following five imperatives:
Comprehensive
Data is a natural output of providers’ daily efforts to coordinate care through conversations with patients, exchanges with insurance companies, consultations with physicians, and more. This data only has value, however, when it is made available to professionals who can connect, analyze and translate it into actionable insights for their organizations.
While a portion of patient health data resides in the EHR, additional information is often housed in ancillary systems that can limit a provider’s ability to connect and access key information at the point of need. Many exchanges are undocumented or stored in paper and computer files that cannot be quickly searched or exchanged. The resulting gaps not only compromise care quality and efficiency, but also put hospital outcomes and performance at risk.
Trace helps to solve these challenges by driving an integrated workflow that seamlessly connects information contained in voice recordings, faxes, documents, and images. By capturing, digitizing and indexing patient data, Trace gives hospitals the ability to form a more comprehensive view of patient health information exchanged across the continuum of care.
“Trace offers solutions to capture virtually any interaction regardless of the communication method – voice, phone, fax, image, or electronic exchange. Even unstructured data from sources like ancillary systems, paper files and verbal exchanges can be captured and integrated with the patient record,” said Scott Overholt, Chief Business Officer at Vyne Medical. “When connected through Trace, these touchpoints create a data trail that can be analyzed for valuable business intelligence about the patient, the hospital’s processes and opportunities for improvement.”
Connected
The key to connecting health data is linking it to the patient record and making it accessible across the enterprise. Through Trace, providers have the option to view a chronological list – or digital audit trail – of all captured records pertaining to a patient. This unified view of collected data including faxed orders, authorization records, medical documentation, financial discussions, and more can then be analyzed and leveraged. One health system client, for instance, referenced Trace voice recordings to reduce process duplication across departments and improve consistency in employee conversations with patients.
“With a complete record of patient interactions across all departments, hospitals can determine exactly what information patients receive at each touchpoint,” added Overholt. “This helps reduce redundancy, ensuring that patients aren’t asked for the same information multiple times by different team members. It also helps leaders identify discrepancies, resolve points of confusion and ensure consistency across departments.”
Recently expanded Trace functionality makes it even easier to connect data to a patient’s record. Auto-indexing leverages advanced machine learning and form recognition technology to read the text on incoming faxed forms, convert it to structured data and seamlessly incorporate it into the patient record. This gives hospitals the ability to auto-populate their systems with patient demographic information found on high-volume forms. This automation helps improve both data entry speed and accuracy by eliminating the need to hand-key information.
For one hospital client, auto-indexing resulted in a 50 percent time savings in order reconciliation and a three-week reduction in the hospital’s order backlog. Another client reported record lows in abandoned call rates and hold times. With fewer manual tasks, employees can spend more time driving high-value outcomes such as proactively engaging patients to schedule upcoming procedures.
Accessible
The Trace suite of digital tools establishes a protected environment to centralize all fax, document and image communications – whether captured remotely or on-site. With Trace, fax is no longer a paper-based process used to send and receive static images for printing, scanning and filing. Through Vyne Medical’s innovative data exchange platform, fax transforms into a fully digital, integrated process producing content that is searchable, accessible and worklist-driven to help automate manual tasks.
A real-time network with no inbound busy signals, the cloud fax infrastructure helps to ensure that time-sensitive healthcare-specific fax workflows are delivered immediately, reducing costly delays and backlogs. Cloud fax replaces physical fax machines as well as on-premise fax servers to reduce system crashes, downtimes, monitoring, and maintenance. Records are interfaced to critical systems, making it easier to track down documents and thereby improving workflows, service levels and team collaboration.
When captured through Trace, information is indexed to the patient account and available in real time across the health system. Activities are indexed and automatically exported to the EHR for enterprise access and exchange. This gives employees encrypted system access from virtually anywhere, allowing hospitals to sustain continuity of care regardless of their employee’s location.
“Trace enables teams to work productively and with high quality both on-site and remotely. Remote teams that use the Trace platform can easily share, collaborate and access data through a single, centralized platform,” said Tim Hoskins, Senior Director of Client Services.
Automated
The integrated Trace platform makes data available where and when it’s needed for an automated, optimized workflow. Customizable dashboards display information relevant to each user, with flags and alerts to drive critical deadlines and activities. Custom fields offer the ability to filter data by team and create worklists based on the unique workflows of each functional area. When information is needed, departments can go directly to the source rather than searching through paper files or asking other departments to resend missing data.
“Workflow features help users assign tasks, create worklists, flag and reserve items, and move activities between team members based on the criteria they set,” said Overholt. “Management features such as audio search, quality scoring and automated reporting help leaders identify improvement opportunities and gain insight into behaviors that make top-performers successful.”
One health system uses Trace to manage its financial clearance workflow and faxed-based preauthorization request process. All faxes now go to a single number and are accessible electronically by the entire team. Automated worklists simplify teamwork, making it easy to divide and shift work between members. After processing, authorizations are automatically exported to the patient record through an integration between Trace and the center’s EHR. This ensures that the EHR and incoming faxes are in sync, reducing the need to view fax data through a different application.
Trace also includes a robust Quality Assurance solution that provides key insights to help improve productivity, process compliance and other quality objectives. The solution leverages digital interactions including faxes, images, phone calls, and recordings of both face-to-face and on-screen interactions to create custom scorecards and powerful reporting tools. These insights give hospitals the ability to track and trend quality scores by team, agent and even keyword – quickly pinpointing problem areas and training needs.
Integrated
While Trace functions well as a standalone system, its benefits increase exponentially when integrated with other hospital data systems. Integrating Trace with other technology solutions promotes more seamless patient handoffs and improved care coordination. It also resolves the frustrating task of managing multiple applications and system sign-ons.
Trace integration services make it possible to include Trace files in the patient’s medical record, while eliminating the manual effort of entering data from Trace into other systems. Through export integrations, Trace sends associated files and images to the patient’s chart; the EHR then matches patient data and displays the file or image when selected.
“Trace captures voice, document and image data and converts it into shareable formats for integration with the patient record. Using Trace, fax data can be digitally integrated with other systems without the need to print, scan and manually enter information,” added Hoskins.
Files from other systems can also be imported into Trace and made available to aid in workflow optimization, automation and quality assurance. Import integrations help automate manual tasks such as recording and downloading phone calls, faxing results to referring physicians and creating work queues for hospital staff.
Putting Your Data to Work
While manual, paper-based processes still exist in healthcare, the tide is turning toward digital transformation. Data management and communication exchange solutions can help providers harness the power of data to meet consumer needs while achieving their financial and operational objectives. Vyne Medical works with hundreds of hospital clients to accomplish these goals through its Trace platform. To learn how Vyne Medical can help you put your data to work, please contact us.
Download our infographic on the 5 Technology Imperatives to Becoming a Data-Driven Organization.