As health care organizations seek to deliver the highest quality of care to their communities while containing health care costs in the process, coordinating patient care effectively across the continuum is more crucial than ever. And yet, given the overwhelming demands on our time, how can we as providers gain a true sense of the other potential contributors to our patients’ care? And how can we begin to collaborate around that care when we don’t always know or have an effective means of communicating with the other providers on a given care team?
Technology has become an integral part of medicine today. The right technology can assist with increased efficiency, improved quality, Patient safety and reduced costs.
Coordinated and Focused Team Delivered Patient care
Building a truly coordinated and continuum-focused approach to patient care requires a fundamental shift in both how health care organizations think about constructing care teams and how they facilitate care coordination within them. Technology has a powerful role to play here, first by enabling organizations to enhance their provider directories and second by facilitating communication between often geographically dispersed providers. Both areas are critical; without the first, providers are limited in their ability to identify the right providers for each patient’s specific needs, and without the second they are limited in their ability to communicate effectively with the other providers involved in a patient’s care.
While Technology can serve as a powerful enabler, but any effort to enhance how integrated teams form, collaborate and deliver care must involve the humans who will ultimately deliver that care. With appropriate technology, and the support of those who will use it, health care organizations can overcome key barriers to care coordination and help teams achieve better outcomes for their patients.
Improving Patient Safety
Encouraging patients to be more involved in their care is important for many reasons including increased compliance and patient satisfaction. Technology helps contribute to patient-centered care by fostering communication between providers and patients via online portals, text messaging, and email. It also increases access to information such as online medical records, which can improve self-monitoring and patient convenience. Communication failures are one of the most common factors that contribute to the occurrence of adverse events. EHRs are designed to help reduce those errors by compiling and maintaining all of the patient’s health information into one easily accessible record.Medical alerts, clinical flags, and reminders are also ways technology can help reduce medication errors and improve patient safety.
Ttechnology has drastically improved the access to reference information. A large range of drug-reference information is now available for hand-held devices, and clinicians are able to quickly access textbooks, databases, and other medical references online.
Build Strong Communication within care teams
Ensuring that providers can build and understand their care teams is the first key step in facilitating integrated care teams and an area where technology can be a powerful enabler. After that, it’s equally important to enable providers to communicate with each other, stay informed about their patient’s care activity and close the loop on care events.
To maximize the effectiveness of integrated care teams, once clinicians have selected a provider they must be able to send referrals using a modern process. However, provider networks are continuously evolving; widespread variation in their infrastructure curtails the potential for electronic health records to enable this communication. Providers can sometimes find it a challenge to communicate efficiently, close the loop or understand what’s happening next for the patient.
Building optimal care teams
When it comes to referrals, the prevailing strategy for clinicians is to build a personal network of a few trusted providers with whom they have worked reliably over time. While this model fosters trusting relationships among providers, especially if they interact on a regular basis, it may not always be in the best interests of their patients. There are certainly benefits to providers being familiar with each other, but a clinician’s go-to provider for a given specialty may not be the best option for every patient.
Providing the best care requires creating teams with provider expertise tailored to each individual’s clinical needs. Therefore, health care organizations maintain “rosters” of providers with different areas of expertise. These tools, also called provider directories, give organizations visibility into their provider networks and the skill sets of the providers therein.
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق