By James Rachlin, Director of Interoperability
It’s indisputable: EHRs are the default technology used by hospitals and health systems for patient communications. And they need third-party solutions to conform to EHR standards and not be disruptive. But hospitals and health systems also often find themselves in need of additional patient communication solutions that do not integrate seamlessly or fill only single communication gaps. That’s why we’re excited to announce Epic® Flowsheets Integration, the latest innovation in our strategic commitment to expanding our Epic Integration solution, improving staff workflows and patient outcomes while consolidating technology solutions.
Listening to our customers is one of our core principles – and that’s exactly how Epic Flowsheets Integration came to life. A customer came to us with a problem: they needed a more efficient and timely way of collecting CipherOutreach’s automated post-discharge outreach responses. Connecting with patients through automated post-discharge questions can significantly reduce hospital readmissions and improve the patient experience, but only if staff has streamlined visibility to their responses.
Now, when CipherOutreach is used to engage patients post-discharge, responses are sent directly to Epic Flowsheets in near real-time, giving all care team members regardless of care setting, the information they need while reducing the need to toggle between systems. Our customer has since gone live with their OB, Post-Discharge and High-Risk programs, with plans to go live with three more programs. We’ve successfully loaded responses from 12,000 CipherOutreach calls to the Epic system thus far.
Epic Flowsheets Integration is just one of the solutions that make up our Epic Integration offering, which also includes EHR Activation Gateway, which delivers messages that originate in Epic with 98% success, and Enhanced Appointment Reminders, which facilitates self-service appointment rescheduling via Epic-linked text messages.
With our Epic EHR Integration offering, you can:
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- Enhance clinical workflows. Funnel patient responses from post-discharge outreach calls directly into Epic, surfacing data to all members of the care team regardless of care setting in near real-time in a single unified view.
- Improve staff satisfaction and retention. Automatically send patient messages and outreach responses to the patient’s record in Epic and minimize the need to switch between different systems.
- Scale your technology. Reach patients across the spectrum of care, both inside and outside the hospital walls, with flexible, multi-purpose solutions that grow with you as your communications needs evolve.
- Report and analyze. Identify areas for troubleshooting with visibility into engagement activity and evaluate trends to optimize outreach programs across patient populations.
We at CipherHealth are committed to interoperability with Epic, and our patient engagement platform complements Epic with communications solutions across the care continuum at scale. Looking ahead, we will continue to build integrations not only with Epic, but other EHRs that 1) enable every health system to gain an all-around view of the patient, and 2) emphasize workflow improvements for staff. In the first case, by combining clinical data from the EHR with conversational data from CipherHealth, all providers involved with the patient’s care can see the same information from an embedded window, giving them insights they may not have had without CipherHealth’s integration. In the second case, we want to address the workflow inefficiencies facing the overwhelmed staff of healthcare organizations everywhere.
Any opportunity to help make healthcare providers’ jobs easier is a win, including reducing the need for double-documentation and displaying patient information in a unified system wherever possible. We’re excited to continue this Epic EHR Integration journey alongside you.
To learn more, visit our Epic Integration page.
