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!

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.

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.

Referral Leakage is lost revenue or volumes from patients being referred outside of your provider network – causing you to lose the referral dollars that you were expecting. Only 35-45% of referrals  for adult inpatient care, measured by revenue, go to a partner hospital and this issue is expounding due to lack of preferred tracking mechanisms, lack of cross-EMR integrations,  use of inefficient technologies, such as paper and fax, along with overall industry trends.

Referral leakage is a growing issue because the competition for referrals is increasing.  In the past 15 years, the number of specialist has nearly doubled, and  the advent of urgent cares and pharmacies has further diluted patient referrals.  Hospitals are also buying up private practices in droves and refer within their own network, which hurts the remaining private practice specialist.  Lastly, traditional networking, such as conferences and rounding as hospitals are waning so physicians are seeking new ways of networking.  Compounding these overall trends is the reliance on antiquated and inefficient technologies, such as phone and fax which can stymie the referral management process and has no tracking and limited patient data.

MedVoy’s referral management software provides the solution to track referral leakage.

• Provides a lightweight patient portal to track and manages referrals and to schedule appointments online
• Refer directly to providers in disparate networks, including physician-to-physician referrals
• Provides a sophisticated business intelligence layer that tracks ROI and your best referral sources
• Offers a new way to network and assists the marketing department in physician outreach

Contact us today to be part of our limited launch!

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.