In order to be compliant with the Medicare Conditions of Participation, home health organizations must keep physicians and other facilities notified about the patient journey on a consistent basis. Most organizations rely on faxing as a means of communication. However, faxing reports repeatedly for multiple patients requires countless hours to be spent everyday, as teams at Graham Healthcare Group were experiencing. As the patient census continued to grow,GHG decided it was time to streamline the notification workflow with automation.
Faxing a clinical summary report requires a series of steps - logging into the EHR, searching for new files to be faxed, extracting the files and locating physician/facility contact information. When this process is manually performed for multiple patients, it can take several hours. As this process was becoming untenable for teams to manage, GHG decided to explore automation.
With the help of Element5, GHG was able to implement a pre-built workflow that automated the the faxing of clinical summaries reports from the EHR to the respective physicians and facilities. The automation was designed such that the summaries were faxed out without any manual intervention using the EHR’s Native Fax Service. GHG’s teams also received access to the Element5 Automation Hub that allowed them to monitor the performance of the automation, intervene manually if necessary and ensure optimum execution of the process. It didn’t take long for the results of automation to manifest.
With 75% of the administrative burden alleviated from the notifications process, GHG no longer had to manually fax reports. This meant that GHG staff could provide focus where it was needed most, on patient care activities and attending to business-critical tasks.
