It is well known that the current model of care is flawed.  Far too often, clinical providers figure out a chronic or post-op patient is in trouble only when they wind up in the ER room. Not only is it very traumatic for the patient and their family – it’s very costly as well.   A variety of progressive institutions are deploying virtual care coordination technologies like the Intel-GE Care Innovations™ Guide to reduce these incidents. By increasing monitoring and communication with patients as part of chronic disease management program, clinical providers can reduce the incidence of ER visits.

If you are a care provider, you’re probably thinking that you agree fundamentally with the idea of virtual care coordination, but the thought of changing workflows and standing up logistics to make a program successful just seems too daunting.  After all, you got into healthcare to treat people, not become a technology and logistics expert.

But there are services available to take this heavy load off providers’ shoulders.  A majority of the work can be outsourced to companies like Intel-GE Care Innovations™.  Care Innovations™ has key partnerships with clinical providers to monitor patients along with the logistics and deployment staff put together a complete, end-to-end program.  Yes, you still need people from your company to interface with Care Innovations on the clinical aspects like protocol thresholds and patient report-outs, but it doesn’t have to be a fleet.  And as the success of the program grows, you can then decide if changing workflow is needed to begin to insource more tasks.

The benefits of going this route are many.  First, you can quickly stand up a program as the pieces are already in place.  Second, your company isn’t realigning already-taxed resources until the program is proven.  Third, you don’t need to learn to become IT and logistics experts, and you can stay focused on what really matters to you – helping people and being a leader in providing care.

But what if you have the clinical staff in place already and want to start to increase their efficiency to take on more patients?  Care Innovations can help with that too.  We can train your nurses on the technology, then manage the logistics and deployment aspect for you.  We’re flexible like that. 

Hold on now, this has to be expensive, right? Not necessarily.  The financial cost of ER admissions runs into the thousands of dollars.  When you compare that with the smaller costs of using technology to support things like medication adherence and patient self-education, the benefit becomes very attractive. 

The fact remains that the traditional model of caring for patients is simply not sustainable.  Virtual care coordination is a new model of care that can effectively begin to address this.  Care Innovations™ can help in whatever capacity is needed to turn the idea of virtual care coordination into reality.  You can see more about how this works at http://www.careinnovations.com/Products/HealthGuide/Services.aspx.