Using Technology to Deliver Value-Based Care Wherever It’s Needed Most

To say the healthcare industry is changing rapidly would be quite an understatement. The population is aging. Insurance is a moving target. Patient-centered care is on the rise.

Amid this evolution, technology is providing remarkable ways to accomplish the triple aim: reduce costs, improve medical outcomes, and improve patient experiences. Moving medicine beyond the four walls of a hospital or doctor’s office is one of the latest approaches for achieving this goal. But an easily overlooked, and incredibly important, piece of this healthcare puzzle is how to manage healthcare teams responsible for delivering value based care both in the office and in the field.

When you send healthcare professionals out into the world, the potential for better meeting patients’ needs increases — but so do the risks. From HIPAA requirements to avoiding scheduling challenges, mobile healthcare includes its own new set of challenges. And technology can help you meet them head on.

Four Ways Technology Can Help

Sending the right specialist to perform the right care at the right place

No matter your team makeup — contractors or employees, phlebotomists or hospice specialists — getting the right care provider to the right patient is key. To do so, you need to know exactly what services your healthcare organization needs to provide, and which team members have the qualifications and expertise to deliver them. Send the wrong person, and you can waste the patient’s time and your company’s money. Look for technology, like the Workpath dashboard, that allows schedulers to dispatch the right healthcare talent using tags that are relevant to the specialized care needed for each patient — like a Licensed RN, Centrifuged Trained Phlebotomist, or Certified Nursing Assistant. By adding the right tech into your scheduling workflow, you can post available appointments to appropriately qualified specialists, who can digitally accept and then monitor and track the status of the appointment.

Improving patient outcomes

As many as 30 percent of doctor’s appointments have a patient no-show, costing the healthcare system as much as $150 billion each year. But the financial costs of missed appointments are just the beginning. When patients receive the care they need in a timely, ongoing fashion, their outcomes improve. The right technology provides a powerful opportunity to increase patient compliance, so that patients can access the care they need. Smart organizations seek out tools that ensure a strong communication loop between all parties: the patient, the care provider, and the scheduler. At Workpath, we use a patented system called Glidepath to keep everything on track with automated appointment reminders and updates to patients and the person responsible for delivering the care. Patients receive a message when their appointment is confirmed, reminders throughout the week prior to their appointment, and a final communication when their specialist is on the way. Service delivery has never been so coordinated. Meanwhile, our mobile app provides healthcare specialists with appointment details and even helps them navigate to the service location and guides them through the organization’s service protocol — all so they can focus on the patient experience and deliver better, more consistent results. When that happens, patient outcomes improve.

Boost outreach

In an effort to serve more people, today’s leading healthcare organizations are looking for ways to move beyond their brick-and-mortar walls. Using the right technology, organizations can deploy an array of specialists in the field to deliver care wherever it’s needed most. In addition to serving as a competitive advantage to the healthcare organization, providing on-demand care and extending your reach to the home or elsewhere can improve patient satisfaction and retention. To make this possible, the right tech platform is in order to curate, organize, and dispatch a team capable of delivering this kind of personalized care. Savvy organizations know to look for technology that offers full visibility and control. The best platforms allow organizations to dispatch, monitor, and track all of their services in one place, in real time. At Workpath, we like to say that with the right platform the complex can become choreography, creating a better experience for all parties involved.

Improving compliance

Protecting each patient’s private information is critically important for both their lives and healthcare companies’ legal standing. But when medicine happens in locations ranging from homes to their place of work, sensitive data is easier to mismanage. As more and more appointments are delivered outside of the traditional healthcare setting, the need for technology that improves compliance increases. Healthcare organizations should look for platforms that offer a safeguarded data center and are completely HIPAA compliant. In addition, look for platforms like Workpath, which provide full visibility into all your specialists’ certifications. As an added bonus, a good platform should also provide the ability to perform background checks at the click of a button. On our platform, background checks are priced at $19.99 per check and you can see the results right in your specialist’s profile.

Healthcare is just the beginning. Any important service delivery — far beyond healthcare — can be improved when the right technology is leveraged. When that happens, time is saved, teams are optimized, costs are reduced, and patient/customer experiences are enhanced.