Consumers want choices. They are no longer relegated to a single provider for services such as automotive maintenance, home repairs and delivery of purchased products. This preference for choice—and convenience—has spurred industries from retail to banking to implement new consumer-friendly outreach strategies or risk losing customers.
Although healthcare came late to this game, an increasing number of medical practices are prioritizing patient preferences. Often referred to as healthcare consumerism, it’s reshaping how patients interact with their healthcare providers because they’re no longer passive care recipients. Instead, they’re active consumers who seek convenience and value in their healthcare experiences.
Sometimes, a lack of system integration makes accessing and exchanging patient data difficult, causing frustration for providers and healthcare consumers alike. When a practice’s IT systems lack interoperability, it risks:
- Inconsistent data;
- Poor coordination of care;
- Increased risk of medical errors;
- Duplication of medical records;
- Increased costs; and
- Poor patient outcomes.
Some of the most common consequences of physician practices’ lack of integrated IT systems are outdated hardware and software and a lack of scalability and interoperability. Fragmented systems lead to bottlenecks, inefficiencies and frustrations rather than streamlined care.
The State of Systems Integration in Healthcare
When fully integrated healthcare technology provides a comprehensive view of a patient’s medical history, promoting more informed provider decision-making that allows for better care. It also enables clinicians to collaborate more effectively, enabling a continuum of care.
If your healthcare practice encounters integration challenges that prohibit you from providing a higher level of care, you’re certainly not in the minority. Although the percentage of office-based physicians electronically finding or querying patient information has increased to 49 percent, about 35 percent of doctors employ only fax, mail or e-fax to share patient health information with providers outside their organization.
Fixing your technology integration frustrations doesn’t require a costly investment. Here, we cover how to fix three common integration mistakes without spending large sums of capital.
1. Outdated Hardware and Software
Research has found that clinicians waste an average of 45 minutes daily utilizing outdated communication technologies. This is problematic for physicians who spend 14.1 hours per week on indirect patient care and 7.9 hours on administrative tasks.
Outdated technology also impacts other practice staff. If you utilize a phone system at least 10 years old, chances are you or one of your staff members have spent more than a few minutes arranging maintenance or attempting to locate a part for it.
Roughly 24 percent of businesses still rely on traditional phone systems, many of which become increasingly unreliable over a five-to-10-year period and don’t provide the flexible communications your practice requires. In addition to discontinued manufacturer support, regular maintenance fees, a lack of potential upgrades and lease line charges for long-distance calls, this outdated technology most likely isn’t equipped to handle PHI, comprising the security and privacy of your patients and your practice and costing you time and money.
If you don’t think outdated communication systems matter to patients, think again: 69 percent of healthcare consumers are willing to switch providers if communication doesn’t meet their expectations. That doesn’t consider how employing outdated technology negatively affects staff satisfaction.
With a cloud-based, HIPAA-compliant phone system offering the latest technology, you don’t have to continue to pay for extra services or purchase new hardware that quickly becomes outdated. For example, phone systems powered by voice over internet protocol (VoIP) don’t require downtime for you to install upgrades. Those designed with an open and customizable platform enable integrations with existing IT solutions, promoting continuity with existing frameworks, maintaining staff competencies and minimizing deployment costs.
2. Insufficient Scalability
Healthcare IT infrastructure scalability is a simple concept. When you implement solutions that grow with your practice, you can more easily expand them to multiple locations or departments as needed. You can also allocate resources efficiently and reduce operational costs while maintaining the quality of care your patients have come to expect.
Server-based communication and practice management systems can be expensive to scale, especially when storage is limited. You rely on direct server access to view data, and even though remote access programs can be installed, this is just another third-party management challenge.
Your practice shouldn’t have to purchase additional hardware or expensive à la carte features and functionality as it expands. Doing so can be costly and puts you at a competitive disadvantage with practices utilizing more advanced technology.
Depending on your practice needs and the size of the community in which you’re based, your technology needs might change from year to year or even month to month. By equipping your practice with a single, cloud-based phone system, you can deploy across your whole enterprise, allowing you to keep your communications framework streamlined whether you have two, three or 10 facilities.
Scalable VoIP communications systems allow you to adapt to fluctuating call volumes, enabling effective communication and collaboration throughout your practice, whether you employ a team of ten or 100. If you want to quickly and cost-effectively adapt to changing demand, cloud-based technology lets you adjust to your practice needs by increasing resources such as storage, computing power, and network capacity on demand without an array of extra fees.
3. Inadequate Interoperability
The healthcare industry has been plagued by a lack of interoperability for over a decade. Technology built to streamline workflows and improve provider-patient communication fails to reach its full potential because of insufficient data sharing. The lack of interoperability and subsequent lower productivity cost the United States approximately $8.3 billion annually, resulting in waste, inefficiency and clinician burnout.
Achieving interoperability isn’t always easy for small medical practices and those serving patients in rural areas. Thus, they forgo interoperability initiatives that would otherwise improve quality of care and outcomes, reduce costs and provide better access to patient records.
By utilizing a HIPAA-compliant VoIP phone system, healthcare practices have a single platform that connects patient information with their voicemail system, facilitates texting between colleagues and routes calls to the correct physician. They have access to real-time patient data, which enables physicians to make more informed decisions about a patient’s care, reduces duplicate testing and procedures, mitigates adverse health events and decreases unnecessary medication errors.
Healthcare providers achieving higher levels of interoperability offer enhanced security and access to private and protected health information (PHI). With more data, they can make informed decisions about a patient’s care without waiting for other records to be sent or accessed by another provider or system.
The seamless data exchange through healthcare interoperability also helps meet patients’ convenience expectations. How? Giving them easy access to their full medical history and enabling them to be more active in their care results in continuity of care across all of their healthcare providers.
Replace Unreliable Integration with RingRx
RingRx was built to integrate. Our VoIP communication platform is designed with a robust API at the forefront, based on open standards for ease of integration and extensibility. All components are equipped with the interoperability required for integration with EMRs, practice management software, revenue cycle management applications, reputation management solutions, patient portals and more.
Along with seamless mobile and desk phone integration for improved communication, our cloud-based phone system allows you to save 50 percent or more than a traditional landline and 30 percent or more than competing services from cable and other VoIP providers. Plus, it was created to be scalable without losing any functionality.
We serve all types of healthcare providers. Our HIPAA-compliant, business-class phone system, built for practices like yours, can be customized to meet your specific business and patient care goals. Start your free 14-day trial of RingRx today!
