Stratice Healthcare: e-Ordering Solutions Transforming Patient Care

Jason Farmer, CEO & Co founder

The one thing healthcare professionals and providers of patient medical products and services needs cannot afford to overlook is time savings opportunities. Manual and largely administrative workflows consuming time demand heavy technological disruption to eliminate inefficiencies. Consequently, the importance of digitalization of paper-based, fax, and phone-driven workflows burdening the healthcare industry soars high in both acute and non-acute care settings. Based in Carmel, Indiana, Stratice Healthcare is transforming the delivery, continuity, and quality of patient care by signficantly reducing inefficient workflows with its innovative technological solutions. Jason Farmer, CEO and Co-founder states, “Adoptions of our EHR-integrated and web-based e-ordering solutions deliver more efficient, intuitive patient care management workflows, faster and more reliable fulfillment of patients’ medical equipment, supplies and services orders, increased patient satisfaction, expedited hospital discharges, critical reductions in unnecessary hospital readmissions, and more effective, safe transitions of patient care.”

Stratice Healthcare offers eOrdersPlus—an intuitive, cloud-based, and interoperable EHR-integrated, and web-based e-ordering platform—electronically connecting healthcare providers to an extensive network of medical equipment suppliers and homecare service providers for the first time. The platform’s guided e-ordering applications integrate directly into practitioners’ existing electronic workflows and auto-populate with patient, treating physician, and insurance/payer information—leaving only a minimal amount of data entry and supporting order documentation to upload before selecting a networked supplier or service provider for fulfilment. The process is finalized by Stratice’s proprietary, embedded e-signature application delivering a complete, compliant “detailed written order” ready for immediate fulfillment and billing by the selected supplier or service provider. By utilizing eOrdersPlus, physicians, suppliers, and service providers optimize their respective time and reduce costs incurred ordering and fulfilling patient medical orders - by greatly reducing or eliminating the back-and-forth phone calls, faxes, and in-person interactions previously required to complete and fulfill orders, and document the patient’s medical record.

Selecting an eligible supplier can be a difficult, often ineffective process due to the complexities associated with closed commercial payer networks and competitively bid Medicare contracts. With the eOrdersPlus platform, the supplier selection algorithm renders all networked suppliers eligible to fulfill the order based on patient location, product need, and specific payer/ insurance coverage -- while providing hospital, physician, and/or patient choice for fulfillment. Importantly, for hospitals that own and operate a medical equipment and supplies fulfillment operation, or that maintain preferred supplier fulfillment relationships, eOrdersPlus enables hospitals to retain all desired patient orders for fulfillment within their system, or invoke preferred supplier/ provider partnerships.

Stratice’s perpetual software development process delivers ongoing enhancements to the eOrdersPlus solution directly in response to its users’ feedback and requests

Additionally, by adopting eOrdersPlus, hospital systems can be assured that upon patient discharge, medical orders are reliably fulfilled, thereby improving the continuity of care and reducing unncessary readmissions caused by patient medical orders failing to be fulfilled on a timely basis or at all.

One of Stratice’s networked large, national suppliers accepts medical order “referrals” primarily by fax from prescribers (as is typical in the industry) and is forced to expend significant resources on manual, duplicative data entry for separate order intake, inventory management, and claim submission platforms. The eOrdersPlus delivery of complete e-orders transmitted to the national supplier, ready for immediate fulfillment, eliminates costly, manual data, and documentation collection exercises. Additionally, the eOrdersPlus web-based solutions enable suppliers to receive faxed or phoned-in patient order “referrals” and immediately initiate an e-order for initial transmission to the issuing/referring practioner for faster electronic completion – often within several minutes – and compared to the long hours or days of wait in the past. In summary, Stratice offers a fully integrated, end-to-end e-ordering platform and reliable open, national fulfillment network offering provider choice in the medical equipment, supplies, and services delivery business.

Stratice’s perpetual software development process delivers ongoing enhancements to the eOrdersPlus solution directly in response to its users’ feedback and requests. The product development roadmap for eOrdersPlus is extremely exciting, and hints at becoming a one-stop destination for hospital discharge planners to efficiently complete and ensure fulfillment of a whole array of patient care needs in non-acute care settings on discharge. Collaboration with the top EHR vendors in the country through active workflow efficiency gains and cost reduction analysis tools promise to indicate 60-70 percent reductions of physician practice/prescriber time formerly spent facilitaing completion of patients’ medical orders.

To date, hundreds of EHR systems are integrated with eOrdersPlus serving over 135,000 care providers – and through current and planned integrations, Stratice expects eOrdersPlus to be EHR-accessible by more than 75-80 percent of the entire U.S. prescribing physician base by 2017 year end. In the interim, Stratice’s web-based e-ordering applications continue to be available to all healthcare professionals and providers nationwide.

Stratice’s mission will continue to focus on rapid digitalization of patients’ medical product and service ordering and fulfillment needs remaining hampered by inefficient workflow processes that include manual data entry in paper forms, collection of complex supporting order documentation, fax and phone-driven ordering and follow-up calls – all continuing to negatively impact patient care. Through the ongoing and future expansion of eOrdersPlus solutions to address other patient medical product and service needs, Stratice will continue to improve the quality and continuity of patient care by supporting the reliable delivery and transition of patient care from healthcare institutions to the home.