While digital transformation is seeking to upend the healthcare industry in several ways, some processes like perioperative coordination have yet to take advantage of these new systems. This has resulted in many healthcare providers taking a substantial financial hit when it comes to inefficiencies in how they coordinate surgeries. In this article, we’ll go over four essential areas that providers must focus on in their quest to implement a modernized perioperative workflow environment.
Efficient role-based workflow and task tracking
The perioperative period involves many moving parts that involve many different individuals and team members. While surgical teams have surgeons and their various administrative coordinators, hospitals can have more than 15 different teams that need to communicate with one another across equipment and room arrangements, pre-anesthetic checkups, patient experience, administrative and financial services, amongst various other needs. Completing tasks necessary for the next phase of surgery to take place becomes much simpler when teams have access to personalized role-based access systems. Additionally, assigning specific tasks to each user plays a major role in avoiding surgery delays and cancellations. Without a unified task coordinator, individuals end up taking responsibility for many different tasks. This can lead to team members getting off track and derailing the entire process.
Personalized dashboards and reporting
Modern web-based applications not only implement personalized dashboards for team members, but they can also identify which teams need access to which specific data sets. These can then be leveraged to make the best decisions when completing tasks and making decisions needed to push the surgery into the next phase. These applications can also track and report successful surgery completions that can go a long way in analyzing how efficient the perioperative workflow is. By taking into account cancellations, rescheduling, and transfers, organizations can better predict changes that need to be made. This can result in less time and money spent down the line as a result of more efficient processes implemented into the workflow.
Patient engagement and request fulfillment
While it is impossible to control every move a patient makes prior to the surgery, the tools and technology to at least notify them of what is required for surgery to take place now exist. Patient engagement through the use of alerts and notifications can be an extremely effective strategy when mitigating the rate of surgery rescheduling or cancellations. Both of these situations are a financial drain on hospital systems that need time and money to allocate and arrange equipment and operating rooms
Web-based applications can also engage with the patient through customizable forms, questionnaires, and surveys that showcase patient demographics, pre-surgical testing, basic vitals, and any other important information. This information can be reviewed by both surgical and hospital teams to make sure services are rendered accordingly.
Since a patient-centric approach to patient engagement should be the goal of every provider organization, this technology can also be used to provide care coordinators with information regarding patient preferences and concerns. Taking this into consideration can lead to a more streamlined journey that lowers the possibility of cancellations as patient requests are met.
Historical data feeds
A higher level of patient engagement means more access to historical patient data that can inform clinical teams. When it comes to the perioperative procedure, the more data the better. Scans, x-rays, and any other kind of historical documentation can be uploaded into the web-based application for better decision making before, during, or after the surgery takes place.
When it comes to modernizing a perioperative workflow solution, coordination, personalization, patient engagement, and data and analytics should be at the front and center. By leveraging modern web-based application tools sooner rather than later, healthcare organizations can expect to save money when it comes to cancellations and rescheduling that are the main culprit for lost revenue. By streamlining perioperative coordination through these four areas, organizations can begin the road towards building a truly transformative workflow for maximum return.
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