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4 Technology Initiatives to Make Home Care Easier in Ontario Healthcare System

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It’s time for a MASH things up a bit in the Ontario Healthcare system!

For those of you that are not familiar with the term MASH, it’s a technology term and not a movie turned sitcom homage.  A (Business) mashup as defined by Wikipedia is the following:

Business (or enterprisemashups define applications that combine their own resources, application and data, with other external Web services.[3] They focus data into a single presentation and allow for collaborative action among businesses and developers. This works well for an agile development project, which requires collaboration between the developers and customer (or customer proxy, typically a product manager) for defining and implementing the business requirements.

Enterprise mashups are secure, visually rich Web applications that expose actionable information from diverse internal and external information sources.

At AlayaCare we love the term Mashup, it’s part of our professional backgrounds, it’s in our culture and best of all it’s in our technology.  We’re big believers in drawing from our diverse professional backgrounds and mixing up other technologies to create new workflows that change the rules for the better.

Let’s explore how referrals are currently processed without 3rd party technology.

Meet Courtney, the Intake Coordinator.

Courtney is barely able to go the washroom for the fear of missing an incoming referral from phone, fax, or the HPG.

She has a growing stack of folders to file, she’s literally worn a path in carpet from her desk to the photocopier.

In the past hour she’s left dozens of voice messages to staff, she’s waiting to receive missing fax for a patient care plan, she’s re-forwarded an email, this time marked urgent with the subject line ACTION REQUIRED.

She’s barely missed the window to accept a new referral because the address in the docket required a Google Map lookup on her extended monitor and this area of town requires a specialized skill that also required her to see which employee was associated to this zone.

Does this sound familiar?  This is likely not the norm for an intake coordinator, but it can happen.  Is there a better way….we think so!

AlayaCare and our technology can help.  Consider the following technology elements working in concert together for an intake coordinator

Mobile:

  • GPS data of field staff. Knowing exactly where staff has been, where they are now and if done right, predict where they will (should) be.  This has profound effects on last minute shift changes (visit requests or visit changes)
  • Real-time communication. Mobile provides an immediate connection for office and staff to share medical information, access staff schedules and log time & attendance.  No more store and forward voicemails, paper visit reports or even mileage calculations
  • Automatically inform patients and family members of staff, schedule, late notifications via email, text messaging or through the patient family portal

Google MAP and Transit API:

  • Incoming referrals that require a separate map plotting which then gets referenced against a zone map of field staff can all be combined in an all-in-one view
  • Provide turn-by-turn directions by car or public transit
  • Synch directly through mobile and provide an estimated time of arrival for the care worker

Schedule and Availability:

  • Access schedule information and let the system recommend which staff to assign to a client
  • Filter client requirements against the HR system to isolate staff that possess the skills, licenses and attributes for this patient

Data Entry and Patient Record:

  • Automatically synchronize and populate client information from the referral system into an electronic health record. Substantially reduce data entry, reduce the chance of data entry error and of course make available via mobile

The underpinning of this new paradigm in intake coordination lies in either software or operations systems that easily talk to one another or the Homecare company is using an integrated end-to-end solution from a home grown or another software provider.

In any case describe above, AlayaCare can help.  We offer our clients an end-to-end platform or you can pick and choose from any of our modules to link into your incumbent provider or partner (assuming of course these entities have APIs)

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