One of the most valuable integrations you can do in healthcare is integrating lab data. Pairing that data with clinical procedure documentation is a powerful combination. Provation recently announced a partnership with ACL Laboratories and so we asked Brandon Hoheisel, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Provation a few questions about the new partnership and the value it provides healthcare organizations.
Tell us a little bit about Provation and your recently announced partnership with ACL Laboratories.
Provation is the premier software and SaaS provider of procedure documentation and clinical decision support solutions. Our purpose is to empower providers to deliver quality healthcare for all. Provation’s comprehensive portfolio spans the entire patient encounter, from pre-procedure through post-procedure, with solutions for physician and nursing documentation, anesthesia documentation, surgical care coordination, quality reporting, billing capture, and more. Provation has a loyal customer base, serving more than 5,000 hospitals, surgery centers, and medical offices, and 700 physician groups.
Provation pathology integration helps providers keep more accurate, up-to-date patient medical records, which is required by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), and streamlines communication between clinicians and pathology labs, such as ACL Laboratories. Provation and ACL Laboratories have teamed up to provide an enhanced and automated process for collecting patient pathology data with documentation solutions Provation® MD and cloud-based Provation® Apex. Together, Provation and ACL Laboratories can improve and automate the digital exchange of patient data for our mutual customers, while empowering clinicians with the information needed to make vital diagnostic decisions and care plans. This new partnership adds to a growing list of major pathology vendors that have invested in integration with Provation solutions.
What was the process like before the integration, and what will be the workflow post integration?
Before the integration between Provation and ACL Laboratories, our customers’ pathology order was a manual process. ASCs would send a hard copy of the pathology order with a specimen. A pathology company would analyze the specimen and generate a result, and the result would be faxed, emailed, or sent to another software application (i.e. a physician practice).
Now, an electronic pathology order is sent from Provation to ACL’s Lab Information System (LIS). The pathology company analyzes the specimen and generates a result in their LIS. The LIS electronically sends pathology results directly to the Provation application at our customer’s ASC.
What are the advantages that come from integrating Provation with ACL Laboratories?
Some advantages are:
- Better data integrity: Because ACL’s LIS sends pathology results electronically directly to Provation at the site, the process is more efficient and accurate.
- More streamlined process: Clinical workflows are improved by reducing manual pathology result scans and removing redundant steps.
- Improved procedure process: The timely exchange of critical patient information in the pathology report enables a physician to complete a procedure report, document findings, and make any recommendations necessary quickly.
- Enables thorough patient records: An ASC has all electronic documentation for a specific procedure in one simplified location: their Provation solution.
How has integration with pathology become more important during COVID?
The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically accelerated the demand for telemedicine and real-time data transfers, including the digital exchange and immediate processing of pathology test results. ASCs may be seeing sicker patients that have been hesitant to come in for care, and the electronic integration between Provation and ACL Laboratories enable physicians to review a patient’s results faster to provide more timely recommendations for treatment.
In addition, in this virtual world, more physicians are working remotely when not performing procedures at an ASC. Having all pathology result data in Provation gives physicians the opportunity to review multiple documents for the same procedure simultaneously.
In what ways will this partnership benefit patients?
The Provation and ACL Laboratories partnership will benefit patients directly. Between the accuracy of the pathology report and the efficient exchange of procedure results and images to the physician, patients will have their health questions answered quickly. The partnership improves clinical workflows, ASC efficiency, and most importantly, patient care and experience.
