1) Who is the service provider? Cliniconex was selected as the provider by a small review committee of AFHTO members, following a formal Request for Quote process. 2) What is the cost for AFHTO members? There is no fee for implementation and the first year of service or 500 transactions. If teams are interested in continuing the service beyond that, they may negotiate usage fees with the service provider (about $.75 or less per patient contact, depending on volume). 3) Are all AFHTO members eligible for participation in the project? All AFHTO members are eligible to participate. Pilot members will be selected based on their EMR system and readiness to participate in March 2015. Please note, this patient contact management system is currently integrated with Telus PS, Accuro, OSCAR, AbelMed, YMS, Med Access, and GlobeMed. Nightingale is not a part of this pilot project; they have a pre-existing patient contact system that is integrated into their EMR. 4) What is required from the team?
- Teams formally commit by signing a service agreement with Cliniconex. ED and medical lead signature will be required.
- Teams commit to having Cliniconex access their EMR server remotely for installation of the software tool that will automatically generate a list of patients and initiate contact by email or voice, according to a standard set of criteria to be used by all teams.
- Teams allocate their IT staff, QIDSS, and/or other staff members as contacts for the project.
- Teams agree to participate in the evaluation of the project, including sharing how many patients were contacted, in what way and what the nature of the patient response was (quantitative and qualitative data). Most of this data will be generated by the patient contact management system.
5) How much work is the pilot for participating teams? Teams can expect to spend a total of about 1 day with the service provider, spread over several sessions (e.g. GoToMeeting calls). On these calls, the service provider will review survey administration work flow including how to set up the voice system, and use a portal for editing voice survey questions, managing voice survey results, and creating email instructions for online surveys. 6) What version of the patient experience survey will be used? Teams will have full control over the content of information shared when the system is used to contact patients. If teams choose to use the system for patient experience surveys (as planned for the pilot), the team will decide what questions they want to ask their patients and whether they want to do that via phone survey or by pointing patients to an online survey etc. 7) What analysis features are available in the system? The system will track and generate reports of the voice survey responses, and progress in contacting patients (i.e. number of attempts and successes in making contact with patients etc). Otherwise, teams would continue to use whatever analytic tools they want. 8) Whose voice is on the phone call to patients? Teams can choose whose voice will be on the messages to patients and what that voice will say. 9) Where is the data from the patient experience surveys stored? Teams will tell the service provider where they want any data generated by the patient contact management system to be stored within their own computer systems. Teams that use the patient contact management system to point patients to an online survey will access the data in those online surveys in the same way they do now. 10) What other approaches can teams use to contact patients? Telus PS, OSCAR, and Nightingale are EMRs which may be able to provide some (or all) aspects of this functionality within existing systems. Visit the relevant EMR CoPs for more information on this. Alternatively, teams may choose to design and implement their own patient contact management system by exporting patient contact information from their EMRs and importing it into an ‘off the shelf’ auto-calling service or system, many of which are available in the market place (e.g. Phone Dialer Pro). 11) What is the advantage of the Cliniconex system as opposed to just using our postal service or subscribing to an ‘off the shelf’ auto-calling system? The Cliniconex system combines many of the patient contact and survey administrative functions into one platform. Unlike ‘off the shelf’ voice systems, the Cliniconex platform is already built, is integrated with your EMR, includes a user portal with templates to set up voice survey questions and randomization, and a mechanism within the portal to set up the standard email invite to patients. Patient contact statistics and voice survey responses are anonymous, data can be located locally, and is managed by the team, not the service provider. Please contact Carol Mulder for more information.
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