Patient-Centered Transplant Care — A Guiding Light For Accountable Care

By Paul Markham, MBA

Collaborative care solutions provide a patient-centered hub, connecting in-hospital and ambulatory electronic health records (EHRs) in conjunction with health information exchange (HIE) systems both locally and across the nation. This uniquely patient-centered national collaborative care solution helps reduce the potential for errors in an area of medicine where hundreds of pieces of data, such as blood type, medications, lab reports, test results and other information is needed to provide quality patient care.

The patient-centered care platform integrates inpatient care and outpatient clinic visits, supports physician order entry, physician documentation, nursing notes, etc., and connects with multiple other laboratory systems in conjunction with the solution specific to the organ transplant. The system should be designed to capture back-office documentation and workflow management, manage patients and populations, drive workflow follow-up on patients independent of scheduled clinic visits, and capture patient data. This data can then report on the multiple, strict regulatory requirements for transplant patients.

One example of a collaborative care platform for organ transplant is The Shands Transplant Center at the University of Florida. The Shands Transplant Center is ranked nationally for overall transplants performed. The center features multidisciplinary teams of specially trained physicians, coordinators, nurses, social workers, pharmacists, physical therapists and psychologists who are experts in transplant care. With more than 300 transplants being performed every year, the need for a single collaborative care solution became increasingly apparent. The center's priority for a solution was data integrity, strong demographics, transplant phases, patient management and diagnostic testing. It implemented a collaborative care organ transplant platform with modules for its six. Shands now has converted 36 years worth of data in six transplant programs to a collaborative care organ transplant platform solution.