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.

Referral process

EMR is designed for point of care delivery and not to track care across providers and for referral management. Today there are many vendors supporting different processes at the facility level with lack of integration between different systems. So the referral process is still very disintegrated even when a referral is made out of an EMR system as the receiving end may not use the same EMR. This poses a big challenge in terms of having one view of the patients across the continuum and assess the financial , clinical and operational outcome of a referral. Also the health care exchanges doesn’t address the process issue and this poses another layer of complexity. Because of this, today we have different versions, softwares and exchanges for post care, ambulatory care, acute care etc and healthcare entities spend a ton of money to add these integrations. This is why MedVoy provides a centralized secure referral management process which not only connects to the back end clinical system but more importantly makes the referral process integrated so as to get a one shot view of the patient across the continuum and assess the outcomes associated with each referrals by the use of sophisticated business intelligence and analytics.

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.

(Source KHIDI/ December 2010)