Omnichannel Healthcare & Patient Satisfaction with Microsoft
The past five years saw the rise of interactive communications between healthcare providers and patients – whether through online electronic forms or through video interactions. These digital channels augment the patient’s physical visit to the clinic resulting in a true omnichannel patient journey, which healthcare providers can leverage to create more value both for themselves and for their customers.
Looking at the next level of omnichannel patient journey, we understood that healthcare providers are concerned with providing more value measured by outcomes and patient satisfaction, while reducing costs. We believe cloud-based, omnichannel healthcare can help providers achieve these goals, and that is where the value of Q-nomy‘s omnichannel healthcare platform powered by Microsoft Azure is demonstrated.
Using Azure SQL Database, Azure App Service, Azure Storage, Azure Queue storage and Azure Content Delivery Network, Q-Flow for Healthcare lets healthcare providers manage, communicate and optimise all aspects of patient treatment, except the medical procedure itself. Azure enables Q-nomy to deploy and maintain complex solution easily, securely and feasibly.
A good example of an efficiency-driven, interactive workflow is an optimised patient administration process in which visit registration, billing and insurance eligibility confirmation is done by the patient via self-service kiosks or by pre-check-in via online portals. This self-service-orientated workflow replaces or reduces the need for assistance by the clinic receptionist, thereby minimising waiting times and improving patient satisfaction.
This is on display at the Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center (CRDAMC) in Fort Hood, Texas. The modern medical centre includes a 615,000-square-foot, 122-bed hospital; 322,000 square feet of outpatient clinics; a logistics building and a 23,000-square-foot central utility plant.
From the get-go, CRDAMC management wanted to guarantee reduced waiting times and improved patient satisfaction and overall care giving performance. The chosen solution had to optimise cross-department patient visits to ensure SLA for the entire patient journey, while providing a unified communication and information distribution system that ensures all patient orders, data, test and lab results are available to the right professional at the right time when the patient reaches their station. CRDAMC also required that the chosen solution will manage kiosks for self-service check in and routing to let visitors skip waiting for a receptionist when they already know what they need.
Q-Flow reduces patient journeys through different departments by at least 45 minutes. Q-Flow increases staff efficiency by streamlining medical case management in multi-department patient journeys.
This omnichannel healthcare approach means the physical and digital channels are entwined to help healthcare providers restructure workflow frameworks around the patient as an active user. The result is less paperwork, fewer manual tasks and less manual allocation of resources, thus increasing utilisation efficiency. Doctors, nurses and other caregivers are not bogged down with administrative tasks and EHR documentation.
Operations and costs go hand-in-hand with revenue efficiency. Shortening the length of stay may yield revenues sooner, but at the cost of higher readmission numbers.
Communicating with patients via various channels such as IoT and wearables, online medical devices, online forms, video sessions, texting and patient portals, while having actionable workflows based on this inbound data, helps avoid such readmissions, is of great value to patient wellbeing and is conducive to a healthy bottom line.
Contact Q-nomy or your Microsoft account manager to learn more on how to employ a cloud-based omnichannel patient journey to improve overall patient outcomes and provider performance.
To learn more about what Microsoft and their partners are doing in health, download the free eBook here.
