FROM GOOD TO GREAT: Healthcare system reinvents workflows with Concord Connect™ Straight-Through Processing

The Concord Connect-driven queues have already resulted in “dramatic” time drops in terms of document searches in high-profile workflows such as medical imaging.

“Getting image files to providers on the same day instead of within a week is something we’ve never had,” Swanson-Lewis adds. “No more logging into another system to see if the image is there. It’s all dropped into a chart and sent out. Our CMO was amazed when we told him we were getting those into providers inboxes on the same day. We have between 15,000 and 18,000 of those coming in per month, so having only one place for them to be located is huge.”

“It’s changing how we work,” he continues. “Now people don’t have to sit and look at, and wait for, faxes all day. The imaging specialist doesn’t have to go into different queues, download forms and images, and then bundle them together to put into our Epic EHR so they can be tied to test orders and then sent to the provider for review. Now they have a single queue to log into, find the images and forms, and move them through the system. It is saving them hours every day, and speeding patient care.”

Physician orders are another area of significant time savings. If an endoscopy request comes in from a clinic and is contained in a longer document containing other details about a patient’s gastrointestinal treatment, the appointment request can be routed out and scheduled while the rest of the information, such as medical images, makes its way to other destinations. At the same time, information such as patient name and date of birth has been checked and matched to existing records, so that a user is able to tap into the most current information about that patient right away. And all without staff having to sift, sort, and reroute the various elements of the original document.

And yet another area where Concord Connect is having a huge impact is medication refills, which suffered from long delays between arrival and physician approval.

“Our medical assistants were wasting a lot of time sifting through paper,” Swanson-Lewis says. “Now they can take immediate actions because the documents and information have been sorted and routed to a single queue to find what they are looking for. No more searching! Also, they were printing the refill orders out and waiting for the doctor to come into the office, which might have only been twice a week. Now they pull up the e-record, enter the request, send to the provider and often it’s approved the same day. That alone is a 3- to 5-day turnaround cut down to 2 days at most. We’re saving time everywhere and have cut down on a huge amount of waste.”

Lastly, the queue for provider orders is also producing strong results. Those come in “fast and furious,” Swanson-Lewis says, and can be complex because they may involve physical therapy, home visits or other procedures that require a physical vs. digital signature.

“Now those requests are routed to a single queue, where a form can be sent to the agency or facility through Epic,” he says. “They can also send us forms to be signed and those enter that queue for processing. Now we only have one person dedicated to reviewing that queue to see where requests are and track them. Before we had several people doing that work.”