Gen Zs aren’t the only people who prefer texting over calling 😊 Rush University Medical Center uses Hello World, our enterprise communication platform, to allow patients to reschedule appointments, accept appointment offers for earlier times, and pay bills through two-way text. The results? A better patient experience, higher schedule utilization, and higher revenue. Since 2023, Rush has seen over 15,000 appointments rescheduled via text message and a 28% increase in patients accepting earlier appointments, leading to increased revenue of around $12,500 per month. They’ve collected more than $600,000 in payments via text so far. Here’s to making healthcare easier!
Our friends at Baton Rouge General Medical Center are closing gaps in access to care by bringing essential health services directly to underserved communities. With BRG Care on the Go—a fully equipped medical truck with access to Epic—Baton Rouge General provides primary care and urgent care services, wellness exams, vaccines, on-site testing, and more—just like a brick-and-mortar clinic. Approaches like this help break down barriers to care, ensuring that more people get the care they need to live healthy lives. Congratulations, folks!
There’s no place like home—and the research agrees. Patients in hospital at home programs experience fewer complications and better recoveries than they would during long hospital stays. Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, and Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust established virtual wards to allow patients to receive hospital-level care from the comfort of home. Nurses monitor patients’ vitals using in-home devices, and they can offer in-person check-ins when patients need a hand with treatment. Across the three organizations, 94%-97% of patients reported high satisfaction with the programs. By the way—hospital at home programs are good for hospital capacity, too. Cambridge University Hospitals treated 1,800 patients at home in just one year, freeing up more than 4,000 hospital bed hours for higher acuity patients. Congrats, everyone!
Did you know that early detection increases the five-year survival rate for breast cancer by 80%? Mammograms are the best method for detecting breast cancer, but their success depends on regular screenings, which have been disrupted since the pandemic began more than four years ago. To help more patients spot cancer early, Community Health Network and Froedtert Health used automated outreach to get folks scheduled for screenings when they were due or overdue. More than 4,500 people received a mammogram as a result, with breast cancer identified in 27 of those individuals.
Congrats to Jillian F. Rork, MD, a dermatologist from Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center and Clinics and the first researcher to receive funding from The National Institutes of Health (NIH) for a study using Cosmos data. Jillian is interested in learning how skin conditions affect people with Down syndrome. Using Cosmos, her team found that people with Down syndrome have a higher prevalence of alopecia areata and thyroid disease than the general population, and that the risk of thyroid disease is even greater in people with Down syndrome who have alopecia areata. Read Jillian’s op-ed about her team’s Cosmos experience: https://www.epicshare.org/perspectives/collaborative-research-with-cosmos And check out their study in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology below
When care delivery is inconsistent, it can lead to higher costs and worse clinical outcomes. Our friends at Yale New Haven Health are making significant progress addressing this issue by creating a standardized model for evaluating, diagnosing, and treating certain medical conditions. They call this their Care Signature Initiative. Using Epic, clinicians can automatically generate care plans for patients with a specific issue, like COVID-19 or alcohol use disorder. Since its launch in late 2019, Yale New Haven Health has successfully developed over 600 Care Signature Pathways. "We have gotten to a reduction in variation that has been a bedrock of quality improvement for years," says Chief Clinical Officer Thomas Balcezak, MD, MPH. Congrats to Yale New Haven Health on reaching this impressive milestone. Read more about their journey below.
As maternal mortality and morbidity rates remain high in the United States, UPMC is expanding access to doula care, aiming to support patients during and after pregnancy. At Magee-Womens Hospital Of UPMC, where 10,000 people give birth each year, doula support is open to all patients as part of their pregnancy care without additional cost, and doulas support nearly 11% of births—almost twice the national average. Program leaders have found that patients who work with doulas have fewer preterm births and C-sections and are more likely to exclusively breastfeed at discharge and attend postpartum office visits. UPMC's doulas use Epic to conduct video visits, complete visit documentation, and communicate directly with care teams. The discrete data in Epic helps UPMC monitor the effectiveness of the program. Congrats to UPMC for their dedication to health equity and patient-centered care!
Nurses at UW Health have been early adopters of generative AI in Epic, using it to automatically draft responses to patient messages. Their hands-on experience with this technology—known as Art, or augmented response technology—has been crucial. "Whether it's telephone calls or MyChart messages, a lot of that interaction is coming through the nurse, so it's just really cool that this is a tool that we can utilize to help with everyday work that we're doing," said Amanda Weber, registered nurse clinical supervisor at UW Health. "We have the option to provide direct feedback on what worked and what didn't work with particular responses that were generated. Any improvements or recommendations that we have, we can input that right then and there." We appreciate you and your close collaboration, UW nurses!
To improve access to urgent care, Bryan Health began offering 24/7 telehealth appointments to patients across Nebraska through a partnership with KeyCare, a national network of virtual care providers. Bryan has since seen an 8% increase in virtual visits and a 99% patient satisfaction rate for virtual visits. Bryan and KeyCare collaborate through Epic’s Telehealth Anywhere network, which allows partner organizations to provide virtual care and share relevant information through Epic. Patients can request and complete video visits right from their MyChart accounts, and KeyCare providers can access their patients’ relevant clinical information just as it appears to providers at Bryan. When a virtual visit is complete, the documentation flows right into Epic so that Bryan’s providers can follow up with their patients. Read more by clicking on the link!
To help patients and keep schedules full, The MetroHealth System (Cleveland, OH) uses AI in Epic to identify patients at risk of missing upcoming appointments. Staff call each at-risk patient individually to confirm their appointments or offer options to reschedule. While personalized calls take a bit more work than automated outreach, MetroHealth considers the juice worth the squeeze. Among an initial study group, their approach drove a 9.4% decrease in missed appointments, with the most dramatic result being a 15.0% decrease among Black patients. From the article: “Barriers that affect patients’ ability to make it to healthcare appointments, including limited transportation and work or childcare conflicts, are known to affect non-White patients and patients who are younger disproportionately. Efforts to decrease no-shows can make existing disparities worse if they don’t adequately account for these patient populations.”
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