Clinical Concierge Service Improves Patient Care
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
A hands-on solution for addressing clinician desktop support issues improves efficiencies.
As adoption of EHRs becomes the norm, healthcare providers are facing a new issue: how to overcome basic technical issues while in the midst of patient care? One company, Kailo, has created a service to do just that.
Kailo's Clinical Concierge is a hands-on solution that addresses clinician desktop support issues in order to improve efficiencies and allow healthcare providers to focus on their patients. Kailo’s research demonstrated most clinicians and their staff often do not report common issues such as PCs freezing, trouble logging in, and application updates that affected computer performance, instead responding by rebooting the computer, sometimes repeatedly, or ignoring the problem.
Most often, physicians and clinicians cannot take the time from patient contact in order to contact the help desk for support and the result can be a decrease in efficiency and at times an interruption in patient care.
A case study conducted at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America showed Kailo's Clinical Concierge identified numerous desktop computer issues – of which 80 percent normally would never have been reported. In just four weeks, over 800 tickets were closed throughout their system.
Amy Burow, IS/Director, Site Information Services at CTCA, said, “It is very common in organizations that onsite support is not able to work on an issue immediately when stopped by a user as they have several tickets in their queue that they are already working on that day that may be a higher priority. The clinic concierge program that we have implemented allows our clinicians to walk up to an IS stakeholder and get service immediately. This is a huge stress reliever as they are able to be back with our patients quicker and that is our main goal, to focus on patient care.”
Before implementing the Clinical Concierge IT Support Program at CTCA, IT support consisted of two desktop support analysts and two clinical support analysts. The clinical support analysts focus on process improvements with technology in general and handle minor configuration within their EMR.
The goal was to implement a solution that allowed physicians and staff to spend more time with patients. Mark Kittrell, one of Kailo's co-founders, describes the clinical Concierge program, saying, "It was initially born as a pilot to test our hypothesis that providing a physical presence would eliminate the barrier to requesting assistance with computer issues, rapidly fix those issues, and proactively approach clinic staff to offer help.”
The Concierge support model takes the same philosophy that CTCA applies to their patients with hands-on, direct support that effectively addresses existing issues as they arise and proactively addresses potential problems.
At the end of the case study, 90 percent of the Physicians and Clinicians surveyed indicated an increase in the effectiveness of solving their computer problems, without any down time with patients.
The program hires, trains, and manages support staff that not only provides excellent service but also proactively addresses unreported issues, prevent future complications, and identify training opportunities to reduce user error.
As healthcare moves deeper into the realm of EHRs and MU, providers would be wise to remember that dedicating attention and resources to IT support will be crucial to the success of their healthcare institutions.