Driving better outcomes with coordinated care teams
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Focus on: Care Coordination |
This year at HIMSS, the industry-leading event for healthcare professionals, Microsoft will bring healthcare partners from around the world to demonstrate innovative solutions currently empowering the digital transformation of the health industry. This blog post is the second in a series about how Microsoft provides the intelligent services and trusted platform for partner solutions; it focuses on solutions that empower care teams. Join Microsoft and its partners at HIMSS18.
No matter where they receive treatment, patients expect care providers to easily collaborate and share information about their medical history—93% of patients rate this among the most important factors to receiving personalized care.[1]
Imagine a world where seamless sharing of information between care providers is possible—where disparate care providers are empowered to collaborate as a cohesive and productive care team. In this world, care providers utilize connected mobile devices to streamline collection and management of patient information. Using a complete view of the patient that includes integrated, real-time data on the patient’s journey across care settings, care providers create accurate, efficient, coordinated care plans that reduce duplicate efforts. When they need to collaborate, care providers communicate with colleagues seamlessly, using a system that automatically captures relevant information to patient case records. Referrals and exchange of patient information is efficient, and with standard procedures agreed upon across organizations, collaboration is easy.
In this world, care providers improve outcomes by using automated reminders and tools to ensure necessary patient follow-up is completed. Virtual care tools enable providers to work with and monitor patients remotely, reducing readmissions. With easy access to risk assessments and recommendations, providers and administrators predict patient care needs, enabling them to reduce costs by optimizing staffing and medical supply orders and ultimately reduce acute episodes.
All this enables care teams to work proactively, spending less time on administration and more time where it counts: caring for patients. This world is no pipe dream; cloud technology is quickly making it a reality.
Microsoft’s vision for empowering care teams
Microsoft recognizes that health organizations need to connect information, people, and processes across the health ecosystem to deliver the streamlined, 360-degree interactions that patients have come to expect. That’s why Microsoft provides technology to enable care team coordination solutions.
The Microsoft cloud enables health organizations to provide easy access to patient information across care settings. In the cloud, patient data is aggregated from across care settings to create a complete view of the patient. This serves as a single source of truth that is accessible to dispersed care team members and updated in real time for efficient, coordinated care. This reduces duplicate efforts and eliminates costly mistakes.
Using intelligent communications like Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams, care providers can collaborate seamlessly with colleagues and provide virtual care to patients, which reduces readmissions and improves patient satisfaction. Microsoft technology also enables automated follow-up with patients to ensure that they receive the attention they need between in-person appointments.
Artificial intelligence and advanced analytics applications accelerate care provider decision-making and even enable care providers to work ahead of patient care needs by predicting them before they occur. Providers have risk assessments and recommendations at their fingertips, empowering them to deliver more effective care in real time. This technology also enables care team leadership to assess daily activities and overall service line performance and use insights to improve and streamline operations.
But Microsoft can’t realize this vision of empowered care teams alone.
Partners make this vision a reality
Using Microsoft technology, partners are building the solutions that deliver on these promises.
MatrixCare is the leading long-term post-acute care EHR provider in the US and the first to offer a true full-spectrum solution. At root, MatrixCare’s goal is to leverage technology to improve quality of life for seniors and those who care for them.
Built on Microsoft Azure, MatrixCare’s CareCommunity solution is an interactive, role-based care coordination and population health management platform that provides a comprehensive, global view of a senior’s personal health record. CareCommunity integrates electronic medical records from acute and post-acute care settings as well as data from more than 500 telehealth devices. It routes key information to the right care team member at the right time, so everyone—from doctors and pharmacists to patients and family members—can make decisions and coordinate care in real time through a single access point. This enables providers to collaborate across multiple settings and provide more personalized and integrated care for better outcomes.
MatrixCare has been recognized as the Long-Term Care EHR Leader in the recent KLAS Continuum of Care Report.
Tribridge, a DXC Technology Company, specializes in purpose-built industry solutions developed on Microsoft Cloud technology. The Health360 Care Coordination solution enables proactive, personalized patient engagement and care coordination across the care continuum.
Health360 Care Coordination makes the best use of data from existing health IT systems, empowering care team members to spend more time impacting more patients, efficiently and personally. It enables providers to create the highest quality treatment plans possible by combining best practices with personalization. It is also a powerful tool for achieving larger population health goals. In order to maximize positive health outcomes through early interventions, medical centers can use Care Coordination to proactively identify at-risk segments of the population and reach out to potential treatment candidates. All of this helps to enable better health outcomes for individuals and the population at large while reducing costs.
Health360 has enabled Barnes Healthcare Services, one of the largest privately-owned post-acute care providers in the US, to leverage an innovative approach to monitor patients for post-discharge to curb readmissions and drive adherence and wellness in managing chronic conditions.
SADA Systems, a Microsoft Gold Partner and cloud solutions provider, solves complex organizational challenges with innovative cloud-based solutions. Serving health organizations nationwide, SADA specializes in virtual health, telemedicine, cybersecurity, data and analytics, and custom application development.
Leveraging Microsoft’s cloud platform, SADA enhances care team collaboration with a communication tool that increases efficiency and communication during daily care team huddles, enables easy sharing of ideas across teams, improves metric tracking by department, and provides access to crucial care analytics, all through the optimization of bots and tools.
SADA Systems worked with Children’s Hospital Los Angeles to implement Microsoft technology that enables remote training of children’s care teams in Armenia. The ability to remotely train surgeons extends patient capacity exponentially, making access to medical care for children in a remote country more of a reality than ever before.
Visit us at HIMSS
Microsoft provides the intelligent services and trusted platform for health solutions. To learn more about how Microsoft and partners such as MatrixCare, Tribridge, and SADA Systems are enabling healthcare organizations to empower care teams, visit our booth at HIMSS 2018.
[1] Transcend Insights (2017)
