CareXM: Elevating Patient Experience with Technology and Automation

CareXM

Bridger Mecham, VP of marketing , CareXMBridger Mecham, VP of marketing
The healthcare industry has been on a modernization path for years. But, the need to transform the way care is delivered has never been this great, in light of changing patient demands and expectations. A leader in patient experience management, CareXM is ideally positioned to help healthcare providers in home health and hospice settings transform the way care is delivered and enhance the overall patient experience. With a team of nurses and non-clinical healthcare professionals, combined with a turnkey solution powered by virtual health technology, it offers round-the-clock support to providers, helping them better serve their patients.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Bridger Mecham, VP of marketing at CareXM, shares insights on how the company helps healthcare providers in elevating the care experience.

Hand-in-Hand with Healthcare Providers

The U.S. healthcare industry is now battling to meet the care needs of its aging population amid ever-increasing nurse shortages. It’s estimated that 9 out of 10 adults in the country over 50 want to age in place, and the industry will have a 1.2 million gap in the number of nurses by 2030. This has created an alarming situation, where the care delivery is now focused on symptoms management rather than treating the root cause of the illness. That’s where CareXM is making a world of difference.

Driven by a mission to care about its clients’ patients, staff, and business, CareXM focuses on empowering healthcare providers to offer more coordinated care that treats the actual ailment. We leverage technology, tech-enabled services, and a unique strategy, where we deploy over 100 registered nurses and over 400 patient-care advocates to support our clients. Our care coordination platform connects providers with professionals trained to meet patients’ medical needs and helps deliver a better care experience.

We help providers in home health and hospice settings manage the influx of unscheduled calls by leveraging our holistic approach that allows for routing, recording, and reporting these calls. This enables clients’ nurses to efficiently manage their daily tasks. They can use the app to update their live status— whether they’re treating patients, handling an end-of-life situation, or taking a break. We can then route these calls to our partners or our nurses that act as an extension of the provider. With our immediate dial-up, dial-down approach, nurses can engage with patients without worrying about phone calls.

At CareXM, we go the extra mile to provide reporting and business intelligence, helping reduce the number of unscheduled interactions. These calls not only cost money to answer, they also pose a risk in terms of ED readmission. Our technology, together with the tech-enabled services, helps reduce readmissions (some clients by up to 88 percent). Being able to complete a hospice call in about 32 seconds as opposed to the national average—33 minutes—enables clients to enhance patient experience and reduce costs.

CareXM’s track record of creating the best patient engagement for clients is a testament to our approach of being an extension of clients’ patient support. For example, we assisted one of our prestigious clients, Bristol Hospice, when they witnessed a sudden growth in demand in 2016. Handling the high influx of unscheduled calls was beyond their capability. Team CareXM helped them address the issue by backing their operations with our technology and registered nurses. Eventually, we were able to reduce the number of unscheduled interactions by half while providing five-fold growth in patient volumes. As a result, the client witnessed a drastic reduction in operational costs, along with better patient engagement.

24/7 Triage Call Support

Healthcare providers within hospice and home health services comparatively have a high share of triage calls, necessitating the 24/7 availability of nurses to attend to them. For instance, we had a client struggling to manage a high volume of prescription refill calls, leaving multiple patients unattended. This drastically lowered the patient experience.

Our team of experts assisted the client to become proactive instead of being reactive when the triage calls came in. Gathering insights from their patient’s medication data and creating automation, we helped them reach out to patients before the refill calls came in. This significantly contributed to the reduction of workload for their clinicians, and the client experienced an expanded care bandwidth and improved patient experience.

Real-time Individualized Care Experience

Our real-time patient engagement and care coordination platform allows nurses to take calls, which automatically integrate into the EMR of a specific patient. We are connected with 18 of many of the top 20 EMRs, allowing nurses to access every patient note and data in a single system.

We leverage technology, tech-enabled services, and a unique strategy to effortlessly monitor, anticipate, and respond to patient needs with triage technology backed by on-demand triage staff

In home health, CareXM offers geo-tracking to locate how far nurses are from patients. It enables us to deploy nurses in the immediate neighborhood, significantly lowering response time. Geo-tracking also aids the routing of calls in remote healthcare settings, allowing us to check on nurses’ availability and direct the call to the first available individual. When nurses are occupied, they have the option to decline the calls, which we will redirect to the next available person.

Our technology suite also has a touchpoint care platform that automatically reaches out to patients without burdening the clinician. It creates care coordination plans based on their comorbidity data and care pathway. The platform then alerts patients about their prescription schedules and collects their daily vitals, based on the plan.

When we locate a patient with troubling vitals, like increased blood pressure for three days in a row, we raise a flag (reporting the specific medical issue) for their provider’s nurses, and ours. Once nurses are aware of the patient’s condition, they access the EMR, cross-check it with our flag notice, and offer the required medical assistance. As a result, healthcare practitioners are empowered to provide each patient with a proactive and individualized care experience.

Flexibility to Address Changing Dimensions of Healthcare Practice

The last two years have seen some incredible improvements in treatment choices. However, the care experience still remains quite antiquated. Having said that, healthcare firms have started to recognize that hiring additional people won’t improve the patient experience. Instead, they are now acknowledging the importance of technology and the need to hire more competent personnel to deliver individualized treatment to each patient.

At CareXM, we realize the importance of technology and strive to be agile and flexible to pace up with evolving healthcare practices and give our healthcare partners the assistance they require. We understand the emergency demands of the home health and hospice sectors and use automation to help them interact with patients and address their most immediate health issues.

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