In crisis care settings, it is imperative that providers and care teams know the status of their patients at any given time. The pandemic amplified this need, exposing both the vulnerabilities and the opportunities in our healthcare communications. Also, it emphasizes the important role health information technology plays in improving patient care.
HIMSS Global Health Equity Week, happening October 19-23, 2020, reinforces the value and potential of health IT to transform health by enabling greater access to clinical data that informs care delivery. Automated notifications are one use case demonstrating the power of health IT to deliver positive impact quickly, easily, and cost-effectively for care providers and patients alike.
Additionally, the new CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Rule Conditions of Participation (CoPs) mandated for May 1, 2021, requires all Medicare and Medicaid participating hospitals, including psychiatric hospitals and critical access hospitals (CAHs), to send electronic patient event notifications – such as admit, discharge, transfer (ADT) – to the patient’s primary care physician (PCP) and any associated community providers.
Given that most hospital systems employ EHR systems that generate ADT feeds, hospitals can easily “check the box” for compliance; however, healthcare leaders must ask if this approach sufficiently contributes to better patient care. As an industry, we need to set higher expectations on care delivery. Simply generating an ADT may satisfy CMS compliance, but will it move the needle on patient care coordination in the most effective way?
Integrating electronic notifications with the health facility ADT information is a simple way to impact provider-patient communication and care outcomes. But to fully embrace the technology, the ADT data should be delivered in a “meaningful” way to ensure that essential patient information is being reviewed and acted upon by the provider as appropriate.
SES Notify, our leading health event alerting solution leverages Direct Secure Messaging to deliver real-time health event notifications to PCPs, care teams, and health plans when a patient or member is admitted or discharged from a hospital. These alerts inform PCPs about health events and health status, while fully adhering to the CoPs mandate. In addition, SES Notify can push ADTs from hospital and post-acute care settings to health plans, and from Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) to providers.
Effective ADT solutions are versatile, giving providers the flexibility to adapt the technology to existing workflows. Moreover, delivering notifications directly into CEHRTs using the providers’ Direct address means there is no need for additional resources or costs. Alerts are securely integrated from inpatient to ambulatory EHRs, accelerating information delivery to the care team across the continuum of care.
Delivering quality treatment in today’s health care settings requires a robust notification platform. Healthcare organizations with alert notification capability are proven to reduce care gaps and inefficiencies while improving care team collaboration.
Global Health Equity Week is a powerful reminder of health IT’s value in improving care delivery to positively affect patient health. SES is proud to support this HIMSS initiative by advancing our notification technology to streamline and inform care delivery. Learn more at www.himss.org/ghew.
