Front-Line Driven Innovation: Vituity Data Team

Vituity data team

The ED team at Redlands Community Hospital (Calif.) was working hard to improve patient experience scores. Their new callback program was getting promising results. However, the time required to look up patient contact info, make the call, and track compliance was a limiting factor.

To reach even more patients, the team worked with Vituity's in-house data team to create a callback phone app. This secure solution integrates with the EHR, allowing providers to make calls with the touch of a button. The enhanced callback program has received rave reviews from both patients and providers, who say it brings a personal touch to emergency care.

To hear the Redlands Community team's story in their own words, watch the video or read the transcript below.

To learn more about Vituity's data solutions and capabilities, visit our website.

Transcript

Location: Redlands Community Hospital Emergency Department (Calif.)

Speakers:

Seth Thomas, MD; Director of Quality and Performance, Emergency Medicine; Vituity
Brian Stinnett, PA-C, Advanced Provider Lead, Vituity
Josh Tamayo-Sarver, MD, PhD, Vice President of Informatics, Vituity
Pam Allen, RN, Director of Emergency Services, Redlands Community Hospital
Charmaine-Mariz Mislang, Redlands resident

Seth Thomas: The challenge with Redlands Community was with their patient experience scores. They were really trying to innovate and come up with a way of improving their scores, and they felt that making patient callbacks was going to help them do that.

Brian Stinnett: We made multiple attempts to do callbacks in the past, and a lot of it centered around using paper lists and keeping stickers with medical record numbers and phone numbers and chief complaints on paper. But how do we keep track of those papers without losing them? How do you do callbacks from home? It became such a cumbersome administrative process that we wanted to do something different.

Using Google Docs and Google Forms, we were able to get away from the hard paper lists and make the info we needed accessible online. Providers could log in from anywhere to see it.

Seth Thomas: When they demoed it for me, I was blown away. I thought, This is really innovative. This is a really neat tech solution to try to help our providers make callbacks in an easy and convenient fashion.

Brian Stinnett: We needed something to further close the loop that was also able to access the medical record and be part of the medical record, in a sense.

Seth Thomas: So I went to the data team, our own in-house Vituity data team, and asked them to get involved.

Josh Tamayo-Sarver: The [Redlands ED] team was already trying to leverage technology. So clearly they'd identified a process that could — or even should — be better. They just needed the support, the infrastructure, and the expertise to make it better.

Brian Stinnett: The data team members were very excited to take what we were doing and transition that to other hospitals. They thought our idea could help other sites work more effectively with patient experience.

Seth Thomas: What the data team created is an app that sits on your phone and allows you to see the patients that you treated the day before or the week before. You're able to connect with them at just the touch of a finger. You make a call, and you can document that call right on the app itself, so compliance is automatically tracked for you. It's super easy, and it really allows our providers to do a great job without having to worry about the hassle of tracking callbacks.

Josh Tamayo-Sarver: The app is the right tool for Vituity providers, because it is born out of Vituity providers. Providers have a need, and they say this is the process I want. And then you create technology like this app that enables that process.

Pam Allen: Our CEO received a letter from a patient talking about her positive experience in the emergency department. What cinched it and just really brought it home was a callback that she received from the physician checking in to see how she was.

Charmaine-Mariz Mislang: I get this phone call, and the number looks familiar. It was the physician who saw me that evening. He just wanted to check up and make sure that everything was still going well. He said if there was anything else that I needed, I was more than welcome to call or come back [to the ED], and he was going to see me himself. And that was just really refreshing.

Seth Thomas: We do have evidence that the use of the callback app when targeting our high-risk populations can actually reduce ED revisits. That's incredible to me. And what that tells me is that we're able to continue the care of the patient outside of the walls of the hospital. It's an amazing thing for our physician to be able to say.

Brian Stinnett: One of the things that a lot of us did not expect was the positive effect it would have on me when I would reconnect with patients later on.

Seth Thomas: Making callbacks for me really speaks to the joy of medicine and allows me to appreciate the human aspect of my practice.

Josh Tamayo-Sarver: The reason that Vituity invests in technology and solutions is because by making providers better, more efficient, and happier, we can effect the lives of millions of people.

To learn more about Vituity's data solutions and capabilities, visit our website.

Originally published Feb. 5, 2019.

Partnering to improve patient lives

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Front-Line Driven Innovation: Vituity Data Team [Video]

Transcript

Partnering to improve patient lives