Provation: 26 Years of Improving Productivity and Reducing Burden

Clinicians want less screen time. To achieve that, they need software that is easy to use AND fits into their workflow. For 26 years, Provation has been working closely with their clinician customers to build a solution that makes their daily lives easier, reduces administrative burden, and allows them to spend more time with patients.

Origin Story

Provation was started by a group of clinicians at Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) in Minneapolis. These clinicians wanted to create a better way to articulate and communicate the procedure they just performed on a patient to other members of the care team.

At the time they were using a dictation solution to record their notes and those notes were stored separately from the images taken during the procedure. On top of that, there were no standards on how clinicians should record medical procedures.

This group of enterprising clinicians teamed up with young, eager programmers and in the basement of HCMC, they created a system that would allow everything about a procedure to be stored in a single place. They named their product Provation – as in productivity via innovation.

From those humble beginnings, the company grew, expanded and began to focus on ways to automate the entire clinical documentation process. Today, Provation’s solutions go well beyond the intra-procedure documentation that they have been historically known for. They now have solutions for perioperative care coordination, quality reporting, and patient intake, just to name a few. 19 of the top 20 US Hospitals (source: Newsweek) use Provation.

How Provation Works

Here in a nutshell is how Provation’s automated clinical documentation solution works:

  • When a physician is ready to document a procedure they performed earlier, they launch the Provation application
  • Provation guides the physician through a navigation tree to offer appropriate selections for quick documentation based on 25 years of specific procedural content without the need to type or dictate
  • Through integration with EHRs, the information is seamlessly transferred to ensure continuity of care
  • Through direct connections with endoscopy scopes, the system can collect all relevant images and add them to procedure notes
  • When the documentation is complete, the system generates CPT and ICD-10 codes based on the procedure note selections for maximum accurate reimbursement

With Provation, this entire process can take as little as 2 minutes vs the 10-15 minutes a physician normally spends documenting a case. That is a significant reduction in administrative work.

Impact on Burnout

Healthcare IT Today sat down with Daniel Hamburger, CEO and Craig Moriarty, Senior Vice President of Strategy & Product from Provation. We discussed their company history, international expansion, and future product plans. We also spent time talking about the issue of clinician burnout.

“It is important for us as vendors to do our part to help reduce burnout,” said Hamburger. “We can’t do everything, but we have a role to play. We build solutions around the doctor’s and nurse’s workflows instead of forcing them to adapt to the way the technology works. By fitting better into their world, we not only reduce administrative burden, we also reduce frustration.”

Hamburger is spot on. We have come through an era in Health IT where the system triumphed over the people using it. We turned clinicians into mouse-clicking data entry robots. We turned processes on their heads just to accommodate quirky technologies. It no longer should be this way. Health IT vendors need to work harder to make their solutions fit into the way clinicians work. Those that do, will contribute to reducing stress and frustration.

A Competitive Advantage

“We are able to do things our competitors can’t,” explained Moriarty. “By working alongside our clinician customers and by listening carefully, we have been able to offer solutions and enhancements faster than anyone else in our space. We are agile. We incorporate customer feedback.”

That close partnership with customers, like many facilities managed by top ASC Management companies including: AMSURG, PE GI Solutions, Surgery Partners, and Surgical Care Affiliates, has allowed Provation to continue innovating in a direction that matches the needs of the market.

Looking Ahead

According to Moriarty, the team at Provation is working steadily on expanding their product suite. They continue to move upstream in the workflow and are planning more in the early steps of a procedure (ie: more patient intake automation, personalized instructions, etc). They are also moving downstream into post-procedure solutions (ie: transitional care management).

More exciting is Provation’s plans to add more AI capabilities through partnerships. They are currently working with other innovative partners like Iterative Scopes who offer an AI-assisted scope for polyp detection. Provation also plans to incorporate AI to help further automate the clinical documentation process.

Finally, the company is looking at ways to offer its customers more insight from the data their solution is capturing. “We collect a lot of data and we are actively looking at ways to better leverage it to provide insights to our customers,” stated Moriarty.

Watch the full interview to learn:

  • The secret to Provation’s successful international expansion
  • The warning signs that indicate you may have problems with your clinical workflows
  • How COVID spurred the Provation Team to work even harder for customers

For more information visit https://www.provationmedical.com

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Provation is a supporter of Healthcare IT Today.

About the author

Colin Hung

Colin Hung is the co-founder of the #hcldr (healthcare leadership) tweetchat one of the most popular and active healthcare social media communities on Twitter. Colin speaks, tweets and blogs regularly about healthcare, technology, marketing and leadership. He is currently an independent marketing consultant working with leading healthIT companies. Colin is a member of #TheWalkingGallery. His Twitter handle is: @Colin_Hung.

   

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