The award winning patient-centric solution now offers a full-feature On-call scheduling functionality to improve clinician response time to patient needs
SILICON VALLEY – October 21, 2013 – AGNITY Healthcare (AHI), a leading provider of Integrated Clinical Communications for healthcare providers today announced the addition of the Personal Reach™ as a part of its integrated clinical communications solution, APTUS MobileCare™.
APTUS MobileCare™ is a secure patient-centric contextual messaging and communications solution to reduce communications related errors by the care team. MobileCare provides clinical communications workflow benefits to the patients’ care team from the time the patient enters a hospital through post discharge. The benefits include: i) the option for clinicians to share their availability status and how they prefer to be communicated with, ii) the availability and status of other clinical staff they wish to communicate with regarding the patient, iii) knowing the other clinicians and staff in the patient’s circle of care to consult via message, voice or video as needed, iv) the ability to share picture and desktop screen attachments during clinical consults, v) optional access to patient information from EMRs, PACS and LIS to share during clinical consults, vi) reports and audits to continually improve clinical communications. MobileCare has been found to reduce communication time for frequent clinical workflows like confirmation to discharge patients, patient transfer from ED to Med/Surg, clarifying medication order, etc. by up to 60%. This results in faster decision making and better outcomes for patients.
Clinician-on-Call™ is an extension of APTUS MobileCare™ that provides hospitals with an on-call scheduling option for clinicians required to be available to provide specialist consultation should such a need arise at a medical center. In many instances, this is a manual non-automated part of the clinical communication process, and leads to slower response times to critical patient needs resulting in low clinician satisfaction. As an option to APTUS MobileCare™ integrated clinical communications solution, Clinician-On-Call™ enables any member of the patient’s care team to instantly know who is on-call for medical consults and immediately connects them.
“On-call scheduling refers to the recurring scheduling arrangement for a group of physicians with similar specialty to be available for providing any specialist consultation should such a need arise at our medical center. A cardiologist-on-call, for example, would be available via phone or in person at all times during the scheduled time. Manually preparing the schedules for all specialties, managing rotations and handling exceptions is a very tedious activity”, explained Dr Iqbal, Physician IT Advisor and Chief of Staff at Meritus Medical Center. “Clinician-on-Call™ with APTUS MobileCare™ automates the entire process. This means that anyone who needs to talk to the on-call physician simply looks up the on-call availability on the APTUS MobileCare™ mobile application and taps his name to initiate a secure message or conversation. In case of unforeseen changes, such as physician absence, Clinician-On-Call™ assigns the appropriate substitute in just one place and on-call availability is immediately updated”, he added. “Our response time using Clinician-On-Call™ feature of APTUS MobileCare™ is one-third the time it would be otherwise. “
The APTUS MobileCare™ solution can even integrate with popular third-party call scheduling systems available in the market today promoting re-use of H-IT systems already procured by hospitals, and providing clinical communications workflow benefits.
“We are always excited when an innovative customer such as Meritus Medical Center benefits from our solutions. We heard them loud and clear, that clinical communications was a pain point for their care team, and APTUS MobileCare™ integrated with on call scheduling would provide significant benefits to them, as acknowledged by Dr Iqbal. We are happy to see benefits derived that impact the bottom line, and we will continue to take our customers’ feedback to add more in the coming quarters”, exclaimed Ken Epps, President & CEO of AGNITY HealthCare.
APTUS MobileCare™ is an award-winning solution that improves clinical communications workflow among clinicians in the patients’ circle of care. The results are improved ROI parameters such as higher HCAHPS scores, shorter length of stay and higher clinical staff satisfaction and productivity. The solution is improving the state of clinical communications & collaboration across the US and Asia.