The only way these pieces of silo software are surviving today is by hiring additional manpower in the hospital, keeping large data sets in many excel sheets and numerous mails and phone calls between teams; hence it is a far cry to think about patient experience. However, modern HCRM like DocEngage solves these problems very intelligently and stitching these pieces together to make a new picture of digital healthcare & patient experience.

In Recent trends, many hospitals have started focusing value based care and patient experience by making systems to work together. The patient experience by enlarge happens in variety of touch points & point of care in the hospital and also outside the hospital.

HIS & EHR integration with HCRM leverages the data from all sources and provides relevant information at the point of care.

For Example - Diabetic patients in the waiting area can be educated by sharing relevant content such as What lifestyle changes you can make to lower the risk of diabetes? or 10 min Yoga poses to help you combat diabetes.

To achieve this level of integration, we need to focus on Interoperability. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) defines interoperability as, the ability of a system to exchange electronic health information with and use electronic health information from other systems without special effort on the part of the user.

In simple terms, it allows the healthcare provider an instant access to the entire patient’s health data from various sources to provide services meaningfully both inside and outside the hospital

Challenges towards Interoperability

1. Heterogeneous Healthcare Systems, Data and Terminology - The major challenge for healthcare interoperability is heterogeneity of systems and also semantically varied data. As many of the HIS systems are not compliance to any standards or protocols prescribed by the govt norms. This poses a great challenge for interoperability.
2. Incompatible or Legacy Systems - Many of the large hospitals are using two or one decade old legacy systems. These systems are non-integrable, uses legacy technology and jailing up the hospital to the world of advancement by always poses challenges for interoperability.
3. Lack of Health-IT Integration Specialists - As the hospital systems & data is very complex to understand by common IT specialist, highly skilled health IT integration specialists are required to integrate healthcare systems where semantics are mapped correctly and conforms to health system standards.
4. Privacy & Security Challenges - Privacy and security rules by HIPAA and various regulatory bodies impose limitations to ensure that health systems appropriately use and disclose protected health information (PHI). Organizations must take steps to ensure HIPAA compliance are rolled out in hospital and all the systems it is using.

Key Trends Driving Interoperability

1. Government Interventions - With Ayushman Bharat, government has taken steps to work in collaboration with healthcare providers to facilitate seamless data exchange between multitude of healthcare systems to coordinate care effectively and integrate with e-claims
2. Providing Personalised Care - With the advancement in patient care outcomes, personalised care especially for critical disease conditions is becoming a reality now. Integrating data from various sources, can help physicians and researchers get a better understanding of the patient’s disease condition and provide evidence based precise treatment.
3. Increased need for collaboration due to double burden of disease - There is a significant shift from communicable to non-communicable diseases; and because of this double burden, patients with chronic conditions have their information spread across multiple EMRs and other systems of multiple providers and organizations. Primary care physicians of such patient’s need to collaborate with specialists for improving patient outcomes and enhancing the care quality.
4. Digital Healthcare & be in the Competition - Your patients are in digital media and everyone in the world connected through digital technology, communicating and engaging with them is a mandate to stay in the competition for the hospital.

Let’s talk about some really practical use cases that we face in our day-to-day hospital and how these can be easily resolved by Connected CRM

1. Wellness Initiatives - Integrating Hospital Information System and Electronic Medical Record can help to breakdown the data and then augment into various patient segments which can help the hospital to provide personalised care.

   For example – A patient books an appointment for any preventive health check through a call center >> this information can then be fetched from HIS into HCRM >> which can send a registration form and a payment link on the patient’s mobile number and email ID. This will help in reducing the waiting time and formalities can be done much before the patient arrives in the hospital.

   Another example - HCRM has the capability of identifying targeted audience for various wellness programs like Substance Abuse, Preventive Whole Body Check-up, etc. Such audiences can then be sent promotional educational content through their chosen mode of communication.

2. Post-enrolment Performance Measure – Patients who are already enrolled in certain programs like Weight-Loss Program, Tobacco Cessation, etc. the data for such patients can be unified at one place and can help caregivers understand the patient’s performance respective to their enrolled program, say for example if a person is on a fertility care plan; the HCRM is intelligent to understand the care plan prescribed, which makes it easy to send personalised messages and care instructions as and when needed according to the plan.
3. Disease Specific Intelligent Campaigns - Having interoperability is excellent in categorising data, especially when it comes to large volumes of datasets. Healthcare data is huge and we all know that with the hype around big data. With the help of AI, HCRM has the capability to understand data patterns from sources such as wearable tech, genetics, Electronic Health Record and more to identify at risk patients enabling healthcare providers to detect a life threatening episode at earlier and treatable stages. For example, a robust HCRM has the capability to identify at-risk pre-diabetic population. Once identified the marketing team can then send personalized promotional content that has proven to slow down the development of Type 2 Diabetes in such patients.
4. Virtual Nursing Assistants - Did we ever thought that a simple yet elegant looking machine can help in automating our homes? No, right. Similarly, HCRM can be efficiently utilised in processing a patient’s medical history and current condition which would help in providing some basic online consultations or can serve as a virtual nursing assistant. This is especially useful for Chronic Disease Management use cases, a cardiac patient with diabetes is advised to record vitals such as blood pressure and blood glucose reading every alternate day at home and is supposed to visit at-least once every month for routine examination misses an appointment, the HCRM will then identify this patient, process his/her readings and send actionable insights to the physician. The physician can then send a voice recorded message to the patient which would definitely have a positive impact on the patient, and motivate him/her to go for the consultation.

DocEngage HCRM is built on health cloud, HL7 FHIR compliant, Restful APIs, Conforms to clinical standards by govt of india; ministry of health, HIS Connectors, EHR Connectors which makes it really easy to integrate with other HIS & EMR’s. The unification of data which gives immense capability to the CRM for patient centric variety of engagement with patients and thus improve the overall experience.

Our Motto: Packaging, Integrating & Analysing Patient Data from Appt, Billing, EHR, HMS systems in a Single CRM leverages pathways a large scope of patient engagement and experience. DocEngage HCRM co-exists with other systems very efficiently.

If you want to improve Patient Experience of your hospitals, reach out to us, we tell you the story of success from many of our customers. Contact Us