9 ways to use EHR data to improve home health care outcomes

Delivering care outside the hospital offers providers an exceptional opportunity to improve patient outcomes and enhance the patient experience. Hospitals that expand into home healthcare, for example, can reach more patients with better care while tapping into a profitable new revenue stream. For many providers, however, home health services are not producing the outcomes they expected. And there’s a simple reason why; Home healthcare is complex.

With so many moving parts, delivering care outside the hospital walls requires careful coordination and efficient resource allocation. Thankfully, new technologies are making mobile care delivery easier than ever. Home health services in particular and the field service sector in general, can greatly benefit from advanced technologies. But there’s a catch! To extract the full power of these technologies and provide the highest level of care, providers must empower their remote care workers with a foundational level of access to EHR data.

Using connected data to achieve your home health objectives

Connected data is essential for effective care delivery outside the hospital walls. To get the insights and information they need to be successful, field care teams must be able to easily access and exchange data across multiple systems and devices.

What’s possible with connected data and improved interoperability? Here are nine things you can do to optimize home healthcare outcomes:

1. Improve care efficiency: Facilitate collaboration by enabling real-time communication across teams, developing individualized care plans, and involving patients in their own care management.
2. Empower patients: Incorporate patient self-reporting into home care regimens via surveys, interactive mobile apps, and portal experiences to motivate patients to participate in their care.
3. Ensure care plan compliance: Monitor patients remotely through devices that know patients’ locations and status. Use the data collected to empower physicians with real-time, intelligent insights and enable immediate alerts.
4. Deliver precision health: Collect and analyze granular data on each patient via virtual, intelligent tools. Leverage the predictive insights you gain to provide more effective, individualized care.
5. Reduce operational costs: Leverage improved visibility into operations to better manage devices and inventory with remote monitoring and automation.
6. Reduce readmissions: Use connected data and machine learning to track patient health and intervene at the right time to avoid readmissions.
7. Improve patient experiences: Enable patients to access information anytime, anywhere and provide access to mobile clinicians to improve communication.
8. Build long-term loyalty: Combine patient engagement touchpoints with clinical data history to break down clinical and business silos. Visibility across the entire patient journey enables the insights required to provide highly personalized interactions that build long-term loyalty.
9. Create new revenue streams: Gather data from the field and other sources to gain a better view of new health issues that need to be addressed with new services or programs.

Increasing time-to-value with the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator

At Microsoft, we developed the new Healthcare Accelerator solution to help providers unleash the full power of their patient data. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator connects your hospital’s EHR data while enabling systems and applications to help you optimize the remote delivery of care in the field. Without a connected data system, home health providers are left vulnerable to a larger margin of error and a lack of informed decision-making.

When your data is connected, you can better leverage digital technologies to elevate home health services. For example, you can:

• More intelligently dispatch care workers with things like optimized routes and skill-based assignments
• Provide care workers with complete patient insight, records, real-time guidance, and cross-team collaboration
• Manage more visits and care workers with fewer dispatchers
• Synchronize inventory, set reorder points, and track inventory
• Remove the risk of medical errors through more accurate data
• Make better informed decisions and take the right action to improve care

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Healthcare Accelerator in conjunction with the Microsoft Cloud, creates the interoperability you need to improve clinical care outcomes and drive more revenue.

Take the next step

Explore our new eBook, Reimagining healthcare with Microsoft, to understand how unlocking interoperability can help you reduce costs, increase revenue, and manage risk to improve patient outcomes dramatically.

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Doug Adams

National Director, Business Applications, US Health and Life Sciences

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