The time between in person and virtual assessments with clinicians is often a black box for health care providers, and yet this is where it’s often key to know how patients and caregivers are doing to ensure care quality, increase treatment compliance, assess treatment effectiveness and avoid preventable complications. Following up enables health teams to monitor a patient's progress, identify misunderstandings, answer questions, make further assessments and adjust treatments.

While doing these follow ups is a long standing recommendation from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), it’s not common practice as it’s complicated, expensive and time consuming to track patients through calls and mail to get the information.

Our digital Smart Check-ins help bridge this gap, and provide insight into day-to-day activities, symptoms, and other lifestyle factors that are important to follow up on. The Smart Check-ins enable asynchronous care to help enhance patient engagement, optimize workflows, and ensure quality care and safety.

Careteam makes it possible for health care providers to add automated Smart Check-ins into a patient’s Action Plan. The health team can use templates and also easily customize the number and types of questions being asked - from simple yes/ no questions to numerical range scales to multiple choice questions, and choose when they are sent and how often (one time or recurrent). The health teams can also choose what response the patient will see depending on what they answer. The timing can be sequenced enabling protocols and follow ups when new treatments are initiated or to follow up on patients waiting on a wait list or being sent home from hospital.

This important capability is key in remote patient monitoring (RPM), Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) and Patient-reported experience measures (PREMs), and in support of best practices in direct patient care, as well as efforts in quality improvement and also the conduct of research. Our platform makes it possible to visualize the results and trends, as well as capture the data to enable efforts in Augmented Intelligence (AI) with data and predictions.

We have built this functionality for a number of reasons:

• Enhanced communication: Patients have more time to articulate their health concerns and questions in writing. This can lead to clearer communication and provide health care providers with more comprehensive information, potentially leading to more accurate diagnoses and treatment recommendations. Asynchronous communication makes health care more accessible to individuals who might face challenges with mobility, transportation, or geographical distance.
• Increased engagement and satisfaction: Patients can submit their health concerns, questions, or updates at a time that is convenient for them, without having to schedule appointments or wait in queues. This is especially helpful for individuals with busy schedules, those in different time zones, or those who have difficulty accessing health care facilities. Patients feel values and this creates a better patient-provider relationship and increases trust in care.

• Monitoring and follow-up data: Asynchronous check-ins allow for ongoing monitoring and follow-up. Patients can update health care providers on their progress, and providers can adjust treatment plans as needed, leading to more personalized care. Check-ins also generate written records of patient communications. This documentation can be valuable for both patients and health care providers to refer back to and track the progression of health issues, treatments, and recommendations.
• Reduced wait times: Traditional in-person or real-time virtual appointments often involve waiting for a specific time slot. Asynchronous check-ins reduce or eliminate wait times, leading to quicker responses from health care providers. Health care providers can also manage a larger volume of patient interactions more efficiently through asynchronous methods. This flexibility can help providers accommodate more patients and offer a higher standard of care.

By providing health teams with the right technology, we help ensure that the right care is delivered at the right time, so that patients can feel well supported by their health care providers along their care journey.

Contact us to learn more about Careteam Technologies and how we help health teams make complex care simple.

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