Sam Hernandez, Release Manager
Health systems are leveraging digital health to streamline processes, engage patients and improve revenue. I’m excited to share this quarter’s innovative features our clients are deploying, and the use cases supporting them.
Below, we highlight how our health system clients are benefiting from digital programs addressing:
- Disseminating patient education
- Engaging patients with depression between appointments
- Encouraging Medicare patients to complete their annual wellness visits
As 2023 progresses, expect to see more diverse examples of how hospitals and health systems of all sizes are meeting clinical and operational goals with and assist from digital.
Featured Client Stories and Outcomes
1. Engaging Patients with Depression Between Appointments
- Organization: Novant Health
- Business Goal: Help primary care providers (PCPs) remotely track patients’ mental health between appointments
- Project: Novant wanted to bring NeuroFlow into Xealth to help enroll patients who have been diagnosed with depression and have qualifying assessment scores. The behavioral health application will help PCPs to remotely track patients’ mental health between appointments and has multiple programs, including for anxiety, depression, and postnatal depression. Xealth has also built in a workflow to alert providers to which patients report suicidal ideation.
- Results: Clinically depressed patients are enrolled based on PHQ9 and GAD7 scores. If a patient has suicidal ideations, an In Basket message is sent to the provider for clinical intervention. In its first month of deployment, seven escalation messages have been sent.
2. Bringing Timely Education to Nebraska Medicine Patients
- Organization: Nebraska Medicine
- Business Goal: Saving staff time by delivering approved content to patients with minimal effort from clinical and IT staff
- Project: Nebraska Medicine sought to integrate Emmi into Xealth for automated and manually ordered patient education. With the Xealth integration, IT resources no longer need to load new content into Epic – content can be ordered through Xealth as soon as it is approved.
- Because of the workflow required to approve new content and the IT work involved in loading it into Epic, Emmi content ordered through Epic was frequently out of date, often taking about a year for new content to be loaded into the EHR. By integrating through Xealth, new content will be available immediately after approval by Nebraska Medicine.
- Further, the Emmi-based Patient Centered Medical Home content receives little patient engagement today because it is not integrated with Nebraska Medicine’s MyChart portal, instead requiring patients to log into the Emmi website with a code taken from a separate email. With Xealth’s provider-based messaging and MyChart integration, Nebraska Medicine expects significantly higher patient engagement rates with this automated content.
- Results: Faster content delivery and time savings for staff.
3. Patient Outreach for Annual Wellness Visits
- Organization: Several healthcare provider organizations
- Business Goal: Improve patient outcomes and increase health system revenue
- Project: The Annual Wellness Visit (AWV) for Medicare is one of the most powerful, widely deployed value-based care tools available. For qualifying Medicare patients, the visit is free and, according to this study from data collected in 2014-16, patients who received an AWV had 5.7% lower overall healthcare costs than patients who didn’t. However, only about 19% of patients actually get an AWV. Because these visits have been shown to improve a patient’s overall health and provide a significant revenue stream for the health system, several providers are using Xealth to encourage newly eligible and existing Medicare patients to come in for this visit.
- Results: Anticipated results include an 80% completed Annual Wellness Visit. In addition to increasing visits, the health systems anticipate seeing an increase in MyChart sign-up and utilization.
Partners & Integrations
Our partner ecosystem continues to grow and expand! If you’re interested in connecting about our partner program, please read more here.
New Vendors
- Xealth has launched a new and improved integration with Emmi, a leading patient engagement and clinical education platform from Wolters Kluwer. Xealth customers can now manually and automatically deliver educational videos and content to patients.
- NeuroFlow is another new addition to the Xealth integrated partner ecosystem. NeuroFlow’s cohesive behavioral health platform allows providers to implement population-wide mental health care. Our shared integration enables us to push back time sensitive and clinically relevant updates to providers directly in the EHR
- Adding to our list of partners in the endocrinology and primary care specialities, we are now working with Virta to push out sign up referrals to patients with a qualifying insurance plan. Virta’s program helps patients manage and improve their diabetes through nutrition and with the help of both technology and coaches.
Expansions
In addition to the new vendors in our Partner Ecosystem, we’ve also expanded and added new features to existing partner relationships.
- We’ve added support for a new surgical oncology program provided by GetWell
- Another Xealth Health System has integrated MedBridge to provide patients a comprehensive home exercise program.
- Our partner, Twistle, has now expanded and automated a Colonoscopy pathway to new clinic locations, removing the burden from providers to place manual orders. Twistle has also added support for a new 90-day Stroke Discharge program to better support patients and their caregivers.