Honestly, it's easy to view inefficiencies as mere personal burdens rather than critical patient care barriers. While we on the vendor side often frame solutions in terms of business metrics, the truth is that everything in healthcare is patient-related.
Recently, I hosted a webinar showcasing a web-facing Medical Records request form. This innovative approach, where an AI-powered LLM built the form from a PDF, demonstrates the potential for technology to streamline patient intake processes. (Interested in seeing this feature in action with your forms? Let's set up a demo!)
Records & Coordination of Care: A Personal Story
A recent family experience highlighted the critical importance of efficient records requests in healthcare. My family member, a current cancer patient with complications from radiation therapy, needed to transition quickly to a new neurologist for specialized treatment.
However, obtaining oncology records from their previous "🏥 Big Hospital System™️" proved to be a significant challenge. This wasn't just about paperwork - it was a matter of life-or-death care coordination. The new provider needed these records to effectively onboard the patient and provide appropriate care.
This situation put immense stress on the family as they weighed their options, feeling caught in a bureaucratic tangle. It truly felt like the only person willing to take ownership was the new provider, who was being stonewalled by bureaucracy.
Patients in the Crossfire
This scenario wasn't just a routine medical records request from a referring provider, payor, or curious patient. It was a critical care coordination issue with potentially life-altering consequences.
Only after calling in a favor did the new provider receive notice that the records request was being fulfilled. Unfortunately, this is the reality for many patients. While we can't blame the staff at 🏥 Big Hospital System™️ - they're likely doing their best with the tools available - it underscores why being the squeaky wheel often pays off in healthcare.
Also: Staff in the Crossfire
And the medical records staff are not to blame in this. They - like so many - are overworked, burnt out, and unable to make meaningful changes, like efficiently expedite the right cases. At best, they're stuck in beaurecratic limbo. At worst, these requests go unnoticed entirely until someone yells loudly enough.
The reason they often work through months-long queues is precisely because of situations like this. EHR archiving and document charting can be clunky nightmares, let alone responding to requests with full chart distributions.
Many EHRs offer batching capabilities (like Cerner RRD/Oracle Health Document Management) to handle requests and batch importing (such as AllScripts' Document Manager). But there's a reason we called our solution "Practice Inbox" - often, it's the private practices, both large and small, that get left behind in technology arms races.
What the healthcare industry truly needs is a comprehensive workflow platform, not just a set of point solutions.
Enter: A Truly Unified Clinical Inbox/Outbox
Reflecting on my family's experience, I couldn't help but think: what if 🏥 Big Hospital System™️ had been using Practice Inbox? The workload reduction for staff in organizing and responding to requests via fax or email is astounding.
While powerful as a unified workflow inbox, Practice Inbox really shines when it comes to chart distribution. Responding to a faxed request or web form takes just two clicks (okay, maybe a few more if you need to choose document types, but we have templates for that!).
Helping Right Where it Hurts
Healthcare has a love affair with documents and forms - a reality that many digital workflows treat as a secondary concern or edge case, given that computers don't naturally handle documents or images well.
But documents are an integral part of healthcare, and for good reason (check out the first few minutes of our webinar to learn why!). It's not a world we can simply leave behind.
Rather than resist this fact, at Calvient, we build solutions that meet clinical teams where they are. We address the gaps where Big EHR and healthcare tech have fallen short.
Let us show you how our patient-centered solutions can make a difference in your front-office operations, HIM processes, and revenue cycle workflows!