How Geneia is Reducing Burdens on Struggling Physician Practices and Hospitals
The world is aligned around one mission: responding to the COVID-19 crisis and mapping a path to recovery. Many companies, of all sizes, are joining this mission, giving however they can — be it supplies, services, or simply compassion. It is incredibly inspiring to see that, among these organizations, are a number of AppExchange partners. Geneia, a healthcare analytics and services company, is one of those AppExchange partners.
Medical professionals are on the frontlines of battle. Nurses, doctors, and hospital workers are giving their all every day. With the rapidly increasing influx of COVID-19 related questions and patients, Geneia knew it had to help struggling physician practices and hospitals.
We spent some time (virtually) with Heather Lavoie, President and CEO of Geneia, to discuss how their organization is focused on helping customers through this crisis.
What is the challenge Geneia is seeing customers face today?
Heather Lavoie: Hospitals and physician organizations are being inundated with patients calling for COVID-19 information, testing, and care. At the same time, these organizations are challenged with unusually high staffing shortages due to COVID-19 exposures.
Primary care practices are very much feeling the strain of the COVID-19 pandemic. Weekly surveys by the Primary Care Collaborative found:
- Nearly eight in 10 clinicians (79.4%) report their practice is under “severe” or “close to severe” strain due to COVID-19.
- The #1 stressor is patient questions with nearly 75% saying they are overwhelmed by virtual inquiries.
How does your application help solve this challenge?
Lavoie: When Salesforce created the six-month free Health Cloud program for providers, Geneia stepped in to augment the solution by matching the six-month free offering and creating a Quick Start solution to rapidly deploy their offering along with Health Cloud.
Leveraging critical functionality from our Theon® Platform for Care Management, Geneia created a free, lightweight version for triaging COVID-19 patients, Theon® Care Management of COVID-19 Patients. The workflow solution:
- Helps physician organizations, hospitals, and healthcare systems assess, document and appropriately triage patients calling for COVID-19 information, resources, and care.
- Enables payers to track, outreach, and manage highest risk and isolate COVID-19 triage.
- Is a tool for payers to offer out to the struggling provider community.
The application includes personas, workflows, and specific clinical guidelines to help front line staff gather pertinent information during unprecedented call volumes and route the patient to the appropriate next best action or outcome. We’re really aiming to reduce the administrative burden on struggling physician practices and hospitals.
Additionally, the application includes dashboards to help indicate where — and to what extent — community spread is in progress. The workflow solution also includes a set of reports to help healthcare organizations manage and plan for appropriate resources, including:
- Patient cases reported by state and county
- Age distribution of calls related to COVID-19
- New cases of COVID-19 over age 60
Knowing how stretched hospitals and physician organizations currently are, this pre-configured solution is deployed via a Quick Start. This means Geneia only needs a few answers from the customer and a few hours for implementation (about five hours). All set-up is done on behalf of the customer; no additional work is required by a system integrator (SI) or customer teams.
It will be enhanced and improved by Geneia to help providers during the pandemic on an ongoing basis.
What impact have you seen from this solution so far?
Lavoie: We’re hearing from physician organizations and hospitals — especially rural ones — that they’re inundated with patient calls and are grateful for a free, easy-to-implement and easy-to-use solution.
That’s amazing to hear. How else are you working with your customers in light of COVID-19?
Lavoie: In addition to the Theon® Care Management of COVID-19 Patients, the Geneia Data Intelligence Lab is working on an analytics model to determine those at the greatest risk from COVID-19 infection, so that healthcare professionals can quickly focus limited resources on those patients with the most need.
Learn more about Geneia’s free care management of COVID-19 patients solution on AppExchange and see what other solutions can help during this time on AppExchange COVID-19 Resources.
