Leading US hospice care provider VITAS Healthcare processes 2 million patient visits to date with Power Platform
In this new blog series, we are sharing examples of customers who have been able to Do More With Less by utilizing the Microsoft Power Platform in their organization to build applications, automate processes, determine insights and more. This week, we are highlighting how VITAS Healthcare has been using Power Platform and Microsoft Teams.
VITAS Healthcare is nation’s largest single-source provider of end-of-life care delivering meaningful hospice and palliative care to its patients and their families across 14 states and the District of Columbia. VITAS has used a Power Platform solution called “Emmy” to process 2 million patient visits – equivalent to 92% of all patient visits.
Today, VITAS proudly delivers specialized care through an interdisciplinary group (IDG) of approximately 12,000 physicians, nurses, home health aides, social workers, chaplains, and volunteers. They work together to provide comfort-focused medical care and psychosocial support to more than 19,000 patients and their families.
Emmy—named in honor of VITAS’ first hospice patient—is a suite of Power Apps canvas applications nested in Teams that allows clinicians and managers to better manage support care coordination, provide continuity of care, and to have real-time feedback with their teammates.
Emmy is now the central tool for managing clinician schedules and patient care coordination. VITAS team managers are no longer dependent on using disparate tools or manual processes to manage the schedules of 7,000 clinicians.
The Power Platform solution offers the patient care team several benefits:
- Real-time visibility into schedule changes, visit completion, etc.
- Allow team managers to focus on complex clinical care, provide mentorship and training to their clinicians, and better support patients and families.
- Allows the care teams to safely continue interdisciplinary group meetings virtually—especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic
- Dramatically reduced the paperwork associated with these meetings.
Vitas believes that despite the significant success with Emmy, they’ve “barely scratched the surface” with Microsoft Power Platform and are looking forward to doing more.
“Creating efficiencies in the healthcare industry on a national level to reduce costs by even 2 or 3 percent translates into billions of dollars in savings. Developing solutions like Emmy with Microsoft technologies is a step in the right direction to reform the way we care for terminally and chronically ill patients.”
– Patrick Hale: Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President
Read more about how VITAS Healthcare has gained success through “Emmy” using Power Platform and Teams.
