Fairview-Ebenezer
Quality of Care and Quality of Life: Connect for Carequality Improves Both
As the complexity of senior care increases, the ability to have a complete picture of a patient’s medical history that reflects all provider encounters is critical to providing quality care. Ebenezer, the senior housing arm of Fairview Health Services, improved their transitions of care with Carequality.
Challenge
Time required to collect comprehensive patient medical history
Solution
PointClickCare®
Connect for Carequality
Outcome
Reduced admissions process by 25% and improved accuracy of information
Fairview-Ebenezer
Minnesota’s largest senior living operator
4 skilled nursing facilities with short-term rehab and long-term care
37 memory care facilities
57+ Independent living apartments with elder care and home care services
When medical records are in disparate systems, building an accurate picture of the patient’s comprehensive medical history is a challenge. Without the right information serious and unintentional errors are more likely to occur.
Chance conversations with patients and their families often reveal key, life-saving details that a comprehensive record would have helped prevent. Equally challenging is balancing this detective work with time spent caring for the patients themselves — something both nurses and patients crave. Unfortunately, too much time is spent as a “medical detective” combing through records to build a complete picture and ensure effective care.
I’ve worked with PointClickCare since the company was founded in 2000. When I joined Fairview-Ebenezer in 2007 as a nurse manager, I helped implement PointClickCare. Soon I was working fulltime as the PointClickCare coordinator, facilitating all the training for our staff.
Being Productive and Proactive with Carequality
One of PointClickCare’s recent developments is Connect for Carequality, which provides access to the US-wide Carequality framework. Carequality is an interoperability framework enabling nationwide care coordination that allows nurses and administrators to access a patient’s history from referral sources, such as hospitals, and quickly and easily reconcile medications and diagnoses.
Connect for Carequality allows:
- Nurses to pull a resident’s medical record directly into PointClickCare’s core EHR without transcription of the physical record
- Staff to connect to more than 4,200 hospitals and 600,000 healthcare providers to obtain a more complete picture of the patient
Fairview-Ebenezer participated in the pilot project in June 2020. From the beginning, the solution made a big difference to the lives of our staff.
Results of Connect for Carequality implementation include:
Admission process decreased from about 2 hours to 30 minutes.
The ability to search by keywords in different healthcare documents is groundbreaking. When reviewing a discharge summary from another facility, I can search for key terms that will tell me whether there are any recorded falls, head trauma, UTIs, and more. Some of the faxed documents we receive can be 40 to 50 pages. Keyword searches allow a nurse to have a rough framework for a care plan before seeing the patient, which makes the entire admission process more efficient.
Fewer touchpoints lead to fewer medical errors.
Previously, every touchpoint of a document increased the likelihood of an error. Now, once the patient is in our PointClickCare Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, I can log in and see their medical records. By having Carequality integrated into the CRM, it not only saves time, but it also reduces errors.
Simple, quick navigation decreases medication data input by 90%.
It is no longer necessary to scan and upload documents. Now, we simply click a button to access and upload Continuity of Care Documents (CCD). We can also navigate through a patient’s CCD quickly by clicking on a hyperlink that takes you to that particular section of their record. For example, clicking on the allergy link takes me to a list of known allergies, eliminating the previous process of looking through 20 pages of information to find each allergy. The ease of viewing existing allergies also means less time required to input medications.
Better able to serve patients treated in other areas and states
It’s not unheard of to fall ill or become injured when you’re away from home. When this happens, your records can be difficult to reach. Carequality solves this problem by providing access to many hospitals and physicians throughout the U.S. that are part of the Carequality network. With Carequality, we can provide access to patient healthcare information across the country.
Digitizing healthcare saves paper and time
Connect for Carequality has eliminated a huge step and headache for us when accessing a provider’s notes from a patient visit. Before, the limitations of their note-taking software meant the provider had to finish their notes, print off a copy and fax it to us. Now, the provider’s notes get uploaded right into the resident’s medical record. This eliminates a lot of paper and saves days’ worth of time.
Enables virtual visits by providers
During the pandemic, healthcare providers were able to consult with patients virtually and access records remotely and securely. Now that providers don’t have to be present to read a hard copy of the record, they are able to minimize everyone’s exposure risk.
More time for patient care
Anytime you can get the nurse away from the computer and at the bedside, the patient is going to benefit. There’s nothing worse for a nurse than feeling rushed when caring for someone as they think about the ticking clock and the amount of paperwork to do. For many of our residents, all they want is for a nurse to sit with them, hold their hand, and talk to them. Patient care isn’t just about medications and diagnoses. We get into nursing to take care of people, and that’s where our heart is—not in documentation. Any time that burden can be lessened giving us time back with our patients, we’ll take it.
Quality of Care Impacts Quality of Life
Connect for Carequality has exceeded my expectations. I initially thought the available documents would be more limited and that the process would be more cumbersome but it’s the opposite. The collaboration with PointClickCare to pilot this solution was excellent. They listened to us when we suggested something that works in our environment and keeps the focus on patients. Sometimes, the benefits are intangible on a typical balance sheet, but they’re invaluable to those receiving care.
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