Sault Area Hospital is making strides in enhancing patient care by upgrading its use of digital technology.
The hospital has gone live with an integrated digital care platform in a collaboration that promises a "digital care journey".
The collaboration with Meditech and SeamlessMD is the first to go live in Canada, Meditech said in a news release.
The collaboration enables healthcare providers to monitor and engage their patients before, during, and after hospitalization using digital, evidence-informed pre- and post-care plans – such as for surgery, cancer, maternity, mental health, and chronic care, the company said.
The goal is to improve patient engagement and outcomes by enabling providers to send their patients instructions and reminders, receive alerts, and measure analytics through dashboards launched from Meditech's Expanse, an electronic health records system.
The solution also reduces manual processes, saving providers and their patients valuable time.
In several clinical studies, SeamlessMD has also been shown to reduce length of stay, 30-day readmission rates, and costs, the company said.
“Health system pressures have driven demand for more scalable ways to engage and monitor patients outside the hospital,” said Dr. Joshua Liu, CEO and co-founder of SeamlessMD.
“With the turnkey integration of our platform with Meditech Expanse, our customers can automate patient enrolment and access remote monitoring from within the electronic health record for an improved digital patient experience.”
SAH is implementing a Surgical Transitions Remote Care Monitoring program across its 12 surgical areas. With over a thousand patients participating to date, feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, the hospital says.
“Technology has increased our ability to connect with patients and encourage them to become active participants in their healthcare journey. Our patients report feeling more supported because of it,” said Dr. James Chan, director of innovation at SAH.
“The integration of SeamlessMD into our EHR helps our providers to deliver high quality care more efficiently and with a patient-centred approach.”
Dr. Graham Elder, chief of orthopaedics at SAH, also appreciates the role this solution plays in helping his team to identify risks sooner and provide timely remote follow-up.
The hospital plans to collect valuable patient-reported outcomes data for continuous quality improvement efforts.
“For patients experiencing unusual complications during the postoperative period, integration between SeamlessMD and Meditech allows us to gain deeper insight into the patient’s day-to-day behaviour,” he said.
“These previously unknown details — which we can use to inform diagnosis and treatment — may prove even more valuable on-call when clinicians are assessing a patient that they are not familiar with.”
The organization is developing a similar program to serve individuals seeking mental health services.
When a surgery is booked in Meditech, patients are automatically enrolled into the SeamlessMD app if they consent to participate in the program. Then, if their surgery date changes, that information is automatically updated
Along with pre-surgery steps and preparation reminders, providers can easily view patient-reported information in SeamlessMD without exiting Expanse.
“As we’ve seen with our patient portal, patients benefit greatly from being engaged, informed, and supported through their health journey,” says Meditech's director of Canadian market and product strategy, Robert Molloy. “By collaborating with SeamlessMD and Sault Area Hospital, we can now offer another tool to enhance the patient experience and improve quality.”