Hyndman Regional Medical Center – a comprehensive medical center based in Pennsylvania that offers home medicine, oral health, behavioral health, and more – has moved from customer-hosted servers to machines. eClinicalWorks cloud-based server to expand network capacity and meet growing data demands.
Since then, its patient base has grown by more than 150% and has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past few years as it no longer relies on physical servers.
Healthcare IT News sat down with Bill Kurtycz, CEO of Hyndman Regional Medical Center, to discuss cloud technology, cloud EHRs, and telehealth and how these technologies have delivered benefits to the supplier organization.
Q. Hyndman Regional Medical Center offers, among other things, home medicine, oral health, pediatrics and women’s health. Please talk about the problems you had before telemedicine and how telemedicine helped to fix them.
ONE. Like many other healthcare approaches, we have turned to telehealth during the pandemic. With so much uncertainty, one thing remains consistent – our patients need care. But we don’t know how to categorize new patients, whether they will come to our facility, or how we will follow up patients with existing medical conditions.
Many practices in our area have closed and stopped providing care to our community. Therefore, we felt the need to find solutions and provide care, even when we were not able to visit our facilities in person.
Our electronic health record provider, eClinicalWorks, introduced us to a telehealth service that we didn’t realize we could access. This feature is integrated with our existing IT infrastructure – including EHR, scheduling, etc. – making it easy to add it to our workflow.
We start by providing telehealth for our primary care services. We’ve found that our patients have adapted to the new format and appreciate their home care option. We then added telehealth for patients supported with medication therapy and virtual consultations.
In addition, as a medical center, we care for a wide range of patients with social determinants of health. Telehealth reduces challenges for our patients, such as transportation, allowing us to provide more equitable care to our community.
We continue to use telehealth in our daily activities. After the pandemic slows and we reopen our physical offices, service providers are still entitled to receive certain appointments from home. For example, if a supplier has COVID-19 but has mild symptoms, they may not be able to come to the office but may still be well enough to work.
With telehealth, this provider can see patients via telehealth, reducing the need to reschedule appointments or transfer patients to another provider. We’ve seen the benefits of telehealth for both our patients and our providers, so we’re working to raise awareness of this option and increase the number of care users. remote health.
Q. You are using eClinicalWorks Cloud EHR – powered by Microsoft Azure, which eClinicalWorks recently invested $100 million in – to help streamline operations and deliver quality care to patients core. How does your work with an EHR provider allow this?
ONE. During the COVID period, our patient count has increased by more than 400%. We’ve noticed our IT capabilities are slowing down because our on-premises servers can’t handle the huge amount of data.
We were using three servers at the time and needed to triple that just to handle the current workload. This will cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few years – which is unsustainable from a business or financial perspective. We needed a solution that could help us scale without having to add an expensive server every time we had a large patient load.
We have completed a financial analysis of the 5-year projected cost of continuing to use an in-house server versus moving to the cloud. ROI favors the move to the cloud. Our EHR provider began this process by running optimization operations on our existing infrastructure and determining that their cloud solution would meet current practice needs. our present and prepare us for future growth.
They conducted a SWOT analysis to find our weaknesses and areas for optimization. As a federally qualified medical center (FQHC), we have limited funds and we have low margins for infrastructure upgrades.
Our supplier works with a lot of FQHCs and understands our situation. They put together a plan that addressed our key pain points and put us on track to maximize our ROI while improving provider and clinical care satisfaction.
We could not have made this transition without our trusted EHR provider. With a dedicated team, they identify problem areas and offer sensible solutions. In addition, our provider handles our IT needs and services, another task that we can now offload our internal teams.
By partnering with our EHR provider to transition to the cloud, our providers and staff can focus on what matters most – taking care of our patients. We can sleep a little better at night without having to worry about disaster management, HVAC or security – the physical server-related problems disappear when you move to the cloud.
Q. How have you achieved efficiency and improved care?
ONE. What we learned from this process is the importance of working with your supplier to perform analysis and determine optimizations. If we hadn’t asked the EHR provider for help, we would have poured all our money into the server instead of investing in a long-term plan that serves both the patient and the provider.
By partnering with providers, we now have the tools and resources we need to deliver the best care to our community.
Our IT infrastructure is more efficient than ever. With the cloud, we’ve cut IT bills in half, and our organization is experiencing faster, more secure data storage and transfer. The cloud provides real-time regional and regional redundancy, so our patient and practice data remains accessible and secure no matter what.
Before going through the transition, we worried about losing control of patient data in the cloud. But we have learned that is not the case. The cloud keeps all of our data safe, no matter the circumstances. If one server goes down, another server is ready to hold our data.
Between faster network speeds, increased security, and flexibility to grow as our practice evolves, we now feel more confident in our ability to deliver care to our patients . Our providers also report higher levels of satisfaction because they now spend less time waiting for network connections or data.
These effects also translate into improved care. Patients now experience more streamlined care when we manage their data in the cloud. Their providers can access all their data using our EHR provider data analysis and search tools for more precise care. We recommend any method that is struggling to meet demand or looking to scale to cloud exploration. It was one of the best decisions we made for our practice.
Follow Bill’s HIT coverage on LinkedIn: Bill Siwicki
Email the writer: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
