As I've pointed out before, referrals is a complicated workflow in healthcare. But it's important nevertheless because it affects transition points in a patients care continuum, in turn affecting outcomes and cost. Par8o was founded by the same guys who started Sermo (the online physician community that had the distinct honor of being the first review on Multiplyd 🙂 ). It's a referral...
When EHRs started showing up on the mainstream industry radar a couple of decades ago, everyone focused on how they helped get rid of the archaic paper records and digitized care delivery within organizations. How time changes perspective. Now EHRs are somewhat commodity and local, intra-organization workflow digitization is a bit passé. The buzz now are inter-organization workflows and health...
In healthcare, 'referral' is used when a provider from one clinical domain directs a patient to a provider in another clinical domain. Most prominent use case is when a primary care physician (PCPs) refers a patient to a specialist or for services performed outside the PCP's office (diagnostic tests, outpatient surgery, etc.). If a referral is deemed medically warranted, the PCP decides at...
The phase of digitizing medical records is passing by, giving way to the next set of tasks. The three most prominent challenges now are: Exchange - how to break the silos of isolated EHRs, and enable sharing based on geography (think HIEs) or affiliation (think ACOs) Consumer Engagement - If the official record is electronic, how to make it accessible to patients and open to contribution of...
Specializations in care delivery are a natural evolution but they have the side effect of increasingly partitioning processes and, in turn, increasing cost and complexity of coordination. When patient care changes hands, it becomes susceptible to errors and communication failures. 'Transitions of Care' is the broader topic that covers problems that arise when patient moves between different care...