Lisa Frain
Oct 8 2024
Reading Time: 4 minutes
Real-time communication is important for home-based care providers. Although detailed and ongoing communication between care team members is key to care quality, the sheer volume of messages can make it challenging to determine which ones need immediate attention.
New digital communication tools can help enhance the quality of care by efficiently supporting how care is delivered and experienced. These tools help streamline communication for your staff, and help multi-disciplinary care teams more effectively communicate and coordinate patient care. For example, our patient discussion groups (PDGs) can include a variety of care team members, from clinical to administrative roles. Let’s take a look at how CitusHealth’s PDGs can help streamline your communication processes.
There are three main benefits when your caregivers use PDGs:
- Comprehensive individual patient history
Every PDG centers on just one patient and provides a single place for the entire care team to see that patient’s history. So administrative staff who are working to gather admission requirements or information for prior authorization can see all the information that’s already been gathered.
Clinicians can use PDGs to see the clinical history of the patient, including information from all caregivers. This supports robust collaboration since everyone has the information they need to make the best decisions, clinically and administratively.
- Administrative audits
From a management and leadership perspective, PDGs can be useful as an auditing tool to look back and see where caregivers and staff provided input to support collaboration. Because everything is time-stamped, team members can help ensure all the steps for admission are being done efficiently and in a timely manner. They can see whether things were properly triaged and check the progression of clinical care to see whether the right actions were taken at the right time.
- Better patient experience
When caregivers use PDGs, the patients themselves benefit. Even though patients are not part of these discussions and can’t see them, they benefit because their care teams have the information they need to provide the right care. The patient doesn’t need to remember specifics about their medication or treatment because it’s already in the system. There’s no guesswork about what care was provided two weeks or two months ago. It takes that burden off the patient’s shoulders so they can focus where they need to.
Adding to the convenience of PDGs, any conversation or information exchange can be tagged in the discussions to integrate across your EHR. There’s no cutting and pasting—the relevant information you want included in the EHR can be sent with one click.
In addition, discussion group members can be added and dropped as the patient moves through stages of care. If the patient has a knee replacement and completes physical therapy and the PT staff no longer needs to be directly involved, they can be removed from the group. And if your organization chooses, you can add external partners to PDGs so that a primary care physician or other outside provider can also be kept up to date.
Using PDGs for quick access to a patient’s detailed history means you can avoid sending faxes, leaving voice mails and the general inefficiency of trying to share important information in real time. It’s also easier for care team members to fill in for staff who may be on vacation, and helps ensure patient care is consistent and high quality.
PDGs offer a convenient way for caregivers to stay up to date on patients as they move through the care continuum. Contact us to learn more about how this valuable tool can enhance efficiency and patient care.
