Reduce readmissions and enable proactive care with IoT
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Try the Health360 solution today on Microsoft AppSource. |
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. One of those partners is Tribridge, a DXC Technology company that empowered Barnes Healthcare Services to utilize the innovative Health360 Care Coordination solution in a push to achieve Intelligent Health. We sat down with executives at Barnes to gain insight into the transformative results they have seen and learn more about the implications for the entire healthcare industry. Join Microsoft and its partners at HIMSS18.
Q: Can you tell us a little about the background of your organization?
Located in Valdosta, GA, Barnes Healthcare Services began as a small pharmacy in Georgia in 1909, and we are now one of the largest privately-owned post-acute care providers in the country. Among our offerings are a range of clinical in-home care services, including continuous, long-term patient engagement and management that drives adherence to care plans beyond hospitals, physicians, skilled-rehab facilities and home health agencies.
Q: What were some of the business challenges Barnes was facing before working with Tribridge/DXC?
Managing patients with multiple chronic conditions is challenging, yet we firmly believe that our customers and stakeholders deserve quality outcomes and satisfaction with their experience. Our legacy technology ecosystem was unable to show how we manage patients across the care continuum, and how our interventions were improving our patients’ quality of life. Care Plans and Assessments were not well integrated or easy to reconfigure, IoT and predictive, proactive capabilities were limited, and patient education and clinical intervention tracking was very manual with risk for inaccuracies.
Q: How were those business challenges impacting your care teams?
Demonstrating the value of our services, quantitatively, was very challenging and labor intensive. Our Healthy at Home program requires a lot of touchpoints between our care team members and their patients, and valuable time was lost dealing with cumbersome data entry.
Q: What led you to pursue Health360?
We had been tracking the population health technology landscape and determined that the Microsoft platform combined with Health360 had the flexibility, extendibility, and industry specificity to digitally transform our business. In addition to Health360’s patient relationship management and care coordination capabilities, we’re also leveraging Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Field Services use cases, Power BI, SharePoint, and Azure.
Q: Where have you see the biggest impact to your business since choosing to partner with Tribridge/DXC?
Barnes focuses on providing exceptional patient care across the continuum while reducing the burdens of chronic care management and readmissions. Health360 has dramatically enhanced our ability to effectively and efficiently manage this care across geographically dispersed patients. The solution enables us to remotely monitor, collect and analyze real-time patient data, via mobile tablets, to help evaluate patient readmission risk, enable more predictive and proactive care, and deliver self-care and other educational materials. With Health360, we can better evaluate patient readmission risks and proactively monitor patient information, empowering us to quickly identify and address health issues.
Q: What are care teams more empowered to do today that they couldn’t do before?
With Health360, clinicians can identify patients who are at risk and require an immediate medical response, those who remain borderline and those who are responding well to their individualized treatment plan and likely will not need monitoring past key milestones.
Q: What particular elements of the solution drove those areas of change?
In addition to remote patient monitoring, Health360 enables us to deliver alerts based on a variety of parameters: blood pressure readings outside of a desired range, compliance with personal goals, admit, discharge, transfer (ADT) events, patient-generated data such as assessment-derived depression indicators, and more. These alerts empower us to take a more proactive care approach and target resources where they are needed most, increasing the number of patients we can assign to care managers while simultaneously improving the quality of care.
Q: What advice would you give other organizations who are considering a similar investment?
There are many products and services vendors in the healthcare IT market. It’s critical that your technology vendors have deep healthcare industry experience and, more importantly, an ability to execute on complex projects. We wanted a platform that was tailor-made for patient relationship management and care coordination yet flexible enough for us to manage on our own and respond to market-driven adaptations along the way. Tribridge/DXC quickly aligned and contributed to our strategic roadmap and was adept in working through data migration and integration challenges.
Q: After this first phase of transformation, what’s the next step in empowering care teams and improving patient care?
Based on our initial success with Health360, we are now leveraging the solution for chronic care management and data generation in nonclinical scenarios, including producing data on success rates for referrals that help us secure new partnerships with providers.
Try the Health360 solution today
Tribridge/DXC has a deep knowledge of the healthcare industry, and Health360 is a proven solution that many healthcare organizations beyond Barnes have seen powerful results with. The solution provides proactive care management, with perpetual and holistic care plans consisting of both clinical and patient goals, tasks, and behavioral changes based on patient preferences. Plus, Health360 pairs perfectly with Microsoft’s deep investments in solutions such as Dynamics, Azure, HealthBots and other Intelligent Health technology. Tribridge is already starting to leverage the latest from Microsoft, enhancing Health360 with greater IoT and Azure Machine Learning capabilities, increasing the efficacy of providing a single view of patients across all touchpoints and departments, and continuing to improve telehealth and remote patient monitoring. Try the Health360 solution today on Microsoft AppSource.
Visit us at HIMSS
Microsoft provides the intelligent services and trusted platform for health solutions. To learn more about how Microsoft and partners are enabling healthcare organizations like Barnes to transform care, visit our booth at HIMSS 2018.
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