One simple tool to solve the whole interoperability mess

Yes, that headline above makes a bold promise. But as we’ll explain below, the Consensus Conductor integration engine can help your organization take significant steps to streamline and automate just about every one of your staff’s regular data exchange workflows — to save your organization time and money and help you deliver better patient care.

Workflow automation, within the realm of interoperability, involves leveraging technology to automate and optimize operations within healthcare facilities. This encompasses a wide spectrum of tasks, such as appointment scheduling, patient record management, staff activities coordination, roster management, billing processes, healthcare insurance handling, and various other operational aspects. 

The primary objective is to boost efficiency, minimize errors, and elevate the quality of patient care. The benefits of implementing workflow automation in healthcare encompass heightened accuracy, improved communication channels for better patient care, cost savings, streamlined data management, enhanced compliance adherence, and increased levels of patient satisfaction.

Workflow challenge #1: Too many data standards

In a good-faith attempt to help the industry share patient information more quickly and easily, a wide range of healthcare organizations and facilities have introduced their own standards for structuring and communicating this data.

The problem, of course, is that now we have a zillion of these data standards. There’s JSON, XML, FHIR, C-CDA… and on and on.

If your organization is like most, your staff probably finds itself jumping back and forth among these disparate standards to exchange patient data with physicians, pharmacies, HIEs, and other providers.

How Conductor solves this challenge

With the Conductor integration engine running in the background of your organization’s IT environment, your staff will be able to easily convert patient data in any of these formats into any other format for whatever next actions are required. 

And when you combine Conductor with the Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool from Consensus — called Clarity — you can even automate the process of converting unstructured documents such as faxes into any of these data languages for ingestion into your EHR. 

Workflow challenge #2: Too many data exchange protocols

Another enormous challenge facing most hospitals and health systems (probably including yours) is the need to maintain several different communication tools and channels in order to exchange important patient data with third parties across the healthcare ecosystem.

A few examples that will likely sound familiar:

• Some of the primary care physicians of patients admitted to your hospital respond to your records requests by Direct Secure Message, and others do so by fax. In both cases, your staff needs to manually re-enter this data into the EHR and send relevant information to the hospitalist and other relevant care team members.

• Some of the pharmacies in your area still require prescriptions sent by fax, a manual process that consumes a great deal of your staff’s time.

• Patient records, lab results, and other time-sensitive documents often come in as PDF attachments via email, and this requires your staff manually review each page and take the appropriate actions, such as notifying the right clinical staff members.

How Conductor solves this challenge

Because the Conductor integration engine can connect any of your disparate systems and normalize the data across them all, you can automate these tedious and time-consuming tasks. 

That means your staff can spend less time manually reviewing documents, populating fields in your EHR, and preparing fax files — and more time caring for your patients.

Workflow challenge #3: Too many steps to exchange time-sensitive patient data

Whether your staff is trying to quickly gain access to data about a patient (via querying Carequality or a regional HIE, for example), or they’re trying to send time-sensitive information to another provider, they’re probably often forced into slow and inefficient workflows.

For example, because patient data is often fragmented across several exchanges, querying records often means logging into multiple HIEs, ACOs, and other databases. And when your employees receive time-sensitive requests from other providers for important patient data, sending that information also often requires a lot of manual steps. That process might include  extracting specific data from the patient’s record in your EHR and re-compiling the information in the requestor’s preferred communication format (such as Direct Secure Message or email).

How Conductor solves this challenge

By pulling together multiple systems into a central digital workspace for your staff, Conductor can speed and streamline many of these time-critical workflows. Your staff can use Conductor to query patient records once across a wide range of HIEs, for example, instead of having to submit these requests to one exchange network at a time.

And when you pair Conductor with the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) engine from Consensus, called SST, you can make these important exchanges of patient data move even more quickly. You can apply automation capabilities to Conductor, for example, to automatically fill in forms, extract data from documents — and even apply AI both to scan incoming PDFs for patient data requests and to automatically trigger relevant next actions.

Ready to see it in action?

Book a free demo of Consensus Conductor