Guest Column: Dr. Ricardo Cook, Marketing Committee Chairman
Over the last few years, we have focused our time and energy on creating what we are, developing strategic business plans to identify ourselves as a new kind of innovative orthopaedic group – one that utilizes strength in numbers to improve the delivery of care.
Now, it’s time we focus on who we are and who we aspire to be. As the foundation of our business is becoming more solid every day, we must now build our culture.
This was emphasized throughout the strategic planning meetings we held last year, and I believe that it comes down to effective internal communication. Specifically, the development of an internal messaging app, email server and a community forum will play an integral role in fostering a cohesive culture throughout The Centers, allowing us to share patient information, expertise and referrals with ease.
I’m glad to tell you that we are in the process of identifying and creating all three of these items. The challenge with each of these is security, as of course anything we use must be secured in a HIPPA-compliant way with enough back-up security features to protect our practices and our patients’ sensitive information. This is of paramount importance.
I have talked to many different companies who have already launched messaging and telemedicine apps, and even looked into designing our own custom app and email server. Much of the technology already on the market with this security has very limited features and abilities, so we have chosen to partner with a company called Healthjump to provide several of these technology services.
Through Healthjump we will have an enterprise model where we can communicate through a very secure domain that complies with all regulations. It includes a secure mobile messaging app for physician-to-physician communications, and will even include a search function to identify important physician information such as location and specialty. For any practices currently looking to create a patient portal, they can do so easily and conveniently through Healthjump.
Perhaps most importantly, in addition to providing a messaging service, Healthjump will be able to gather information from our varied EMR and practice management systems to identify the data that will become critical for compliance reporting over the next few years. This data aggregation and mining will also enable us to create our own best practices by identifying the processes and outcomes obtained by different divisions for similar procedures.
As the healthcare system continues to move to a “patient as the consumer” mentality, practices will succeed or fail based on effectiveness and clinical outcomes. Because of this, the ability to develop our own best practices will allow The Centers to provide the highest quality care to our patients and receive recognition for it. For example, once we have developed unique best practices, we can publish and disseminate this to physicians outside The Centers, thereby continuing to establish ourselves as leaders in orthopaedic care.
To create an environment where we are all connected and can benefit from one another’s experience, we must first have cohesive infrastructure in place. We will eventually have to adopt a common email domain for legal and regulatory reasons, and it is something we are already working on under the guidance of our Interim Compliance Officer, Susan Wahlberg. With a common email, we will look more like a unified group of doctors instead of a disjointed consortium. This will require some added costs – from set-up and data migration to cloud hosting and installing the best security measures – but it will be worthwhile and necessary to take this step towards a unified technology system. We will even be able to use this email service to send occasional push notifications to employees and physicians with internal updates every few months, as another way to keep everyone involved and up-to-date on The Centers’ initiatives.
Our email service or our patient portals will enable us to communicate with our patients in the same fashion, scheduling occasional emails and notifications to patients to remind them that we are invested and committed to their health. This is a huge advantage of our power as a large, unified group of doctors, for it means that everything we are doing to build The Centers is ultimately a commitment to community health. Through the expertise and infrastructure of our organization, we will be able to provide all the services the community needs at the highest quality and under one roof. This just simply wouldn’t be possible without our size.
Finally, we are in the process of creating an ongoing forum as part of the employee-only portal on our website, our own “Intranet.” Each employee will have their own username and password, and this secure section of the website will hold key documents such as our insurance and employment information for easy access. It can also be the first place jobs within CAO are posted to encourage internal growth among our staff. The second step will be expanding this into a discussion forum, where physicians can present topics in different disciplines and discuss them. We could have specific threads for foot & ankle or joint replacement, for example. We will also have the ability to create individual discussion forums for physicians, administrators and employees to share knowledge and information related to their work.
This is an exciting time for us as a young organization. The business principals are in place, and now we are creating our own unique culture. We have the tremendous opportunity to leverage the wisdom and expertise of our physicians to benefit our patients, and applying this technology is just the first step.
Over the next several months, as these technologies are implemented, I hope you will take advantage of the new ways to communicate, share information and review patient histories to work more closely together and develop a cohesive identity as a leader in empowering private-practice orthopaedic care.