New Ingenious Med-funded research shows that 86% of hospitals and health systems still rely, at least in part, on their electronic health record (EHR) platforms for revenue cycle management (RCM) capabilities (see chart below). RCM platforms, however, are emerging as critical technologies for enabling greater communication among physicians, clinicians, and comprehensive care teams.
While EHRs and patient portal functionality are designed to facilitate communication between physicians and patients, the platforms are simply not designed with EHR-to-EHR communication capabilities. Adding to the care coordination complexity, health systems operate a multitude of different vendors’ EHRs, thus making revenue cycle management more difficult.
Today’s EHRs also create challenges beyond the revenue cycle. The Journal of the American Medical Association published an investigation in 2023 showing that EHR-based functions can actually inhibit communication and social connections among clinicians.
“The EHR was found to negatively impact team function by promoting disagreement and introducing areas of conflict into team relationships related to medical-legal pressures, role confusion, and undefined norms around EHR-related communication,” according to the JAMA authors. The JAMA investigation continues that some physicians expressed EHR-related distress that erodes team well-being.
Given those and other challenges, hospital and health system C-suites are increasingly prioritizing communication to enable collaboration and advance care coordination, according to research from Sage Growth Partners. The healthcare consultancy’s independent survey of 108 health system and hospital executives shows that:
- 67% rank care coordination as their top digital health priority for 2024
- 69% say digital health is improving clinical efficiencies
- 62% say it is increasing access to care
The research also demonstrates that approximately half of hospital and health system C-suite leaders are seeking technologies outside their EHR for a new range of functionalities, including revenue cycle management. In contrast to EHRs, hospitals and health systems can harness RCM tools as a central source of patient and billing information—to optimize revenue cycles in an EHR-agnostic manner.
“Ingenious Med provides the ability for clinicians to communicate with each other and to instantly track relevant data in tables with comprehensive analytics and dashboards,” says Gregg Parrish, Technical Account Manager, Ingenious Med. “Clinicians can use the tools to access data in real-time and to streamline planning for care coordination purposes.”
Specifically, Parrish explains that the platform’s Messaging, Indicators, CrossCover, and Census List operate across nearly all EHRs.
- HIPAA-Secure Notes and Messaging with voice-activated features empower peers to securely exchange patient information with one doctor or the full care team.
- Length-of-Stay Indicators can be used to view patient information, flag patients with a particular condition, see readmission and cost data.
- CrossCover enables physicians to leave notes for other physicians, including name, diagnosis and a to-do list, so one physician can cover for another and the original doctor can track the progress of that particular patient.
- Census List is a feature physicians can leverage to view their patient list for a given day, and add the necessary billing information immediately following a patient encounter.
“Taken together, the tools enhance communication, collaboration, care team billing, and charge capture,” Parrish says. “Physician-to-physician communication also benefits patients because the information is being delivered to everyone in real-time, which helps clinicians avoid keeping patients longer than they need to be in the hospital.”
To learn how Ingenious Med’s technologies greatly enhance physician-to-physician communication, schedule a demo today.
Source for chart: New Ingenious Med-funded survey of 100 hospital and health system leaders conducted independently by Sage Growth Partners in Q1 2024. The full result will be available in an forthcoming market research report in Q2 2024.