Methods for Improving Healthcare Quality
Now more than ever, facilities across the United States and abroad are focused on care coordination, patient safety and data safeguarding, and identifying cost-effective efficiencies.
With over twenty years of experience guiding the healthcare industry toward an efficient and streamlined care process, Vyne Medical offers the following tips:
1. Collect, Organize, and Analyze Patient Data
Patient data can come from various sources, including EHRs (electronic health records), outcomes studies, and patient satisfaction surveys. Even if you’re already using EHRs, they alone are not an all encompassing solution. Although useful for accessing patient health outcomes, communications, and cost factors, they lack key features that could help hospital and healthcare systems maximize efficiency and deliver optimized performance.
Collecting patient data is critical, but it’s what healthcare organizations do next that really matters.
- Organizing patient data in one place promotes more efficient scheduling, authorization, coordination, and reimbursement of care.
- Collecting multiple mediums of data in a single platform can seem overwhelming, but with Vyne Medical’s Trace® platform, the process is seamless. Trace works with your existing EHR and creates a more complete, digitized patient record and is available as a single-department or enterprise-wide solution.
A factor of growing importance: with Trace, remote employees can also capture and access information in a protected environment, allowing them to efficiently complete their work from virtually anywhere.
2. Streamline Information Delivery
An alternative to storing medical information in filing cabinets, Electronic Health Information Exchange (HIE) is an essential tool for the medical industry in pursuit of functional interoperability. The electronic availability of accurate records and the ability to share them securely helps prevent data reentry, medication errors, and duplicate testing. Most importantly, it can improve overall patient outcomes. In fact, streamlining information delivery directly correlates to care quality: successful HIE implantation improves physician and patient communication and reduces inefficiencies and redundancies such as wasted visits, duplicate testing, medication errors, and inaccurate understanding of health data.
A good electronic health information exchange process allows both patients and healthcare providers to securely access and share vital medical information. Vyne Medical helps healthcare institutions improve healthcare quality by overcoming the biggest obstacles to information delivery, including maintaining patient data privacy, accurate ID matching, and avoiding the headache of incomplete records. The Trace platform links image capture, voice and face recordings, and fax to the patient record–promoting data integration and standardization, and has the ability to integrate patient health information with other systems, ensuring the right information is available to the right people. Trace’s export integrations transfer data from Trace to external systems such as an electronic health record (EHR) or document management system. Export functionality transfers both Trace transactions and indexed information to receiving applications.
3. Consider What’s Worked for Other Healthcare Organizations
Numerous sources, including online sites like Patient Care Link, a collaborative website created by the Massachusetts Health & Hospital Association to provide healthcare initiatives between the healthcare industry and the general public, offer information on facilities’ successful implementation of new technology, including telemedicine and patient data optimization. Researching the area in which your institution would like to improve, identifying facilities where it’s been done, and reaching out for questions is a great place to start. Typically, administrators welcome the opportunity to offer advice to another institution looking to improve patient health outcomes.
4. Set Goals and Check Your Progress
Your goal is to improve healthcare quality, but do you know what metrics to consider, or what KPIs to track? Begin by deciphering where care quality falls short, and then decide which high-impact areas to tackle first. Consider the following healthcare quality indicators:
- Admission and readmission rates
- Length of stay
- Ease of transfer of health information
- Cost per discharge
- Patient experience
- Medication management
- Number of outpatient and inpatient visits
- Patient functional outcomes
- Risk adjusted mortality
- Preventable healthcare harm and healthcare-associated infections
- Risk adjusted total cost of care
- Prevention and treatment of opioid and substance use disorder
For more information on meaningful healthcare quality measures, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) offers a wealth of useful information for providers, e.g., slides and recordings of past webinars on quality metric measurements. Their materials educate healthcare institutions on ways to improve through the use of CMS’ which uses quality measures developed for “effective, safe, efficient, patient-centered, equitable, and timely care.” Other organizations, including the National Quality Forum and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, provide guidelines and measures to consider backed by evidence-based studies. The National Quality Forum’s measure search tool helps providers refine their search for more specific measurements to track based on condition and care setting.
After determining the KPIs, your organization will track, creating a plan for improvement starts with getting organized and finding a solution. Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, used the Trace platform to track metrics like gross AR days, denial write-offs as a percentage of gross revenue, and trial balance with the goal of reducing administrative denials. Moffitt successfully reduced denials from $4 million to $2 million, meaning they had $2 million more to invest back in patient care. Joanna Weiss, Vice President of Revenue Cycle, shared: “We are a mission-driven, patient-centric institution. One more dollar recovered represents one more dollar the Center can invest in curing and preventing cancer. That objective automatically garners excitement and engagement.”
Your Partner for Improving Healthcare Quality
Find out how Vyne Medical’s solutions can help optimize the patient experience for your organization. Contact Vyne Medical to schedule a call with one of our professionals today.