PointClickCare: What’s the Ideal Technology for Care Transitions?

What’s the ideal technology for providers who want to ensure seamless transitions of care? First and foremost, that technology must be interoperable, advises CAST Commissioner Dave Wessinger, co-founder and chief technology officer at CAST Partner PointClickCare.

In a recent blog for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, Wessinger suggests that interoperability is about more than just using a common set of standards, services, policies and practices to facilitate timely data exchange among disparate platforms and applications.

“Interoperability is not only about making the right data connections happen, it is also about connecting the key players in a health network to enable a person-centric approach to care delivery,” writes Wessinger. “It’s about exchanging data that can be turned into intelligence.”

Wessinger has several suggestions for providers who want to achieve this kind of interoperability:

• Start with a secure and reliable connection hub. This hub can ensure that you and your provider partners are receiving “the right data at the right time in a way that care providers can use it to benefit the patient,” he says. 
  
  
• Implement discrete data messaging, secure text messaging and even digital faxing and ask your health care partners to do the same. This will optimize care transitions and improve care quality, says Wessinger. 
  
  
• Put an infrastructure in place that lets you share patient data with all of your provider partners, even those who are outside your network. This will dramatically reduce the errors and delays that plague paper-based transactions. 

“The ideal technology for care transitions would enable providers to become better integrated, better connected and more streamlined with their partners in care, whether they are hospitals, long-term care communities, Accountable Care Organizations, physician or pharmacies,” concludes Wessinger. “Through this effort and an enhanced technology infrastructure, we will be able to drive better outcomes for both people and health care businesses alike.”