Evidence shows that if patients seeking specific high-risk surgeries or treatments would chose high-volume hospitals for their care, this could save more than 4,000 lives annually. However, due to the lack of data currently available today and interoperability issues in EHRs, evidence based referrals are not widespread.

MedVoy’s evidence based referral workflow has the ability to incorporate any evidence based metrics into its referral process thus making sure that the patients are referred to the right facility with the better processes, and positive outcomes.

source http://www.academyhealth.org/Training/content.cfm?ItemNumber=1691

Some disturbing facts from this article:

• Three out of every 10 tests are reordered because results cannot be found.
• Patient charts cannot be found on 30% of visits.
• One-fifth of medical errors are due to the lack of immediate access to patient information.
• Thirty to forty percent of the money we spend on health care–more than half a trillion dollars a year–is spent on costs associated with “overuse, underuse, misuse, duplication, system failures, unnecessary repetition, poor communication and inefficiency.”

MedVoy was designed to address precisely these issues with transparency and collaboration.  By improving the referral workflow, doctors have immediate access to patient records – eliminating the duplication of procedures, improving efficiency and improving the continuum of care.

See MedVoy’s recent launch of their referral management software at the Health 2.0 Conference.  The Health 2.0 Conference selected MedVoy because of how it is transforming the current referral paradigm from an onerous paper shuffling process to an interactive patient portal that can integrate with existing EHR systems and that facilities continuum of care. 

Watch the video of the launch at the Health 2.0 Conference!

Using a referral system, such as MedVoy can integrate with your existing EHR to help fill these gaps

Enhances Provider Communication

Healthcare relies on effective communication amongst the providers, specialist and staff.  MedVoy enables the ability to track and manage referrals – even across disparate EHRs and patient management systems.  A specialist can understand their cases before they see the patients – allowing them to use their limited patient time most efficiently.

Improved Documentation

MedVoy’s secure, HIPPA compliant platform has a very lightweight workflow and then uses push/pulls to other EHRs to allow access to all documentation in one place and to help avoid the duplication in procedures – eliminating the onerous data entry and documentation concerns.

Feedback Loops Aids with Continuum of Care

A current constraint with referrals is that they often fall into a “black hole”, where the referring providers do not know what happened with the patient.  Using MedVoy, the referring providers can easily look at the referral status, follow up notes, appointments and ongoing patient care.

One of the biggest concerns for meaningful use is interoperability, simply stated that different EHRs cannot talk to each other. In an interview about the deadlines, Dan Haley, VP of government relations at athenahealth, posed the question “Why is it that in 2013 different EHR vendors can’t talk to one another?” The lack of interoperability across EHRs is a major hindrance for the current referral paradigm. When a doctor using one EHR refers a patient to a specialist at another hospital using a different EHR, there is no way to integrate the two patient records. As mentioned in a previous post, 60 percent of ambulatory providers state that the move to EHR is increasing their workload just for document alone. However, rather than waiting for the interoperability to be addresses by the juggernauts, there are solutions that can help integrate data and manage patient records. MedVoy uses push/pulls to other EHRs and build connectors to allow access to all documentation in one place and to help avoid the duplication in procedures. MedVoy helps to bridge the gap between different EHR and put all the documentation into one place so it is simple, easy to use – helping to save time and money.

Last week, MedVoy was one of a handful of companies selected to launch at the Health 2.0 Conference in the Silicon Valley.  The Health 2.0 Conference focuses on showcasing cutting-edge innovation that’s transforming health and health care, which is why MedVoy referral management platform was selected – as it transforms the referral process from being an onerous paper shuffling process to an interactive patient portal that can integrate with existing EHR systems.

Some emerging trends from the Health 2.0 Conference:

Technology empowers patients

Using patient self assessment tools, consumer can now utilize technology to take health care into their own hands, such Smartphone apps and devices to track such things as, exercise levels, monitor blood samples, medication adherence, biometric devices, and yes, even breathing.  These types of transformative technology can be utilized to bring about long term behavior changes to improve overall health

Healthcare Reform Guidelines

The Affordable Care Act has some crucial stipulations, such as the transformation to Electronic Health Records (EHR) and the convoluted “meaningful use guidelines.”  MedVoy helps with meaningful use by offering a lightweight patient portal that is using with the existing EHR.  Another topic was the paradigm shift from the existing reactionary patient-doctor model to a proactive model with improvements to preventive care and early detection of health problems which is helping to drive a cornucopia of consumer devices.

Big Data is bigger than ever!

Big Data continues to dominate the discussions at the conference, with the increased use of technology, consumer devices, EHR, biometrics, human genome mapping, information exchanges, pricing transparency, etc, – there is now, more than ever data that ever which is an exciting time for data scientists and analysts.  The key will be to integrate the data and leverage the right tools in order to bring about the transformative change that is possible with this data and to improve long term healthcare outcomes.   Talk to one of our experts today if you need help with making sense of your big data.