The Azara Community recently sat down with Azara Healthcare team members to hear their perspectives on a wide range of issues related to the use of data at community health centers. In this segment, Heather Budd, VP, Clinical Transformation at Azara, discusses the company’s Visit Planning Report, which provides “at-a-glance” overviews of patients’ upcoming appointments, highlighting services or labs that may be due or overdue.
Azara Community: What has the reaction been to the Visit Planning Report?
Heather Budd: Our customers are really excited about this new visit planning tool we’ve designed because it’s a report that brings the clinical data together at the point of care so that good decisions can be made. Additionally, it’s driving delegation (of tasks), which is such an important concept in the patient-centered medical home era that we now live in.
In the past, providers had access to registered reporting to try to do visit planning in advance of a patient coming in to make sure they have all their “ducks in a row” to execute against the care that’s needed. But that required breaking the patient up into their different diagnoses or just looking at their preventive care.
The reality is that trying to use six or seven different reports to prepare for a next-day visit is just not tenable, and it’s not efficient. What the visit planning tool does is bring all the relevant alerts together that are important for a patient. It’s going by an individual provider or a care team’s schedule and it’s saying, “these are the actionable items you really need to do at this particular visit."
The nice thing is it is enabling the care team support members as opposed to the provider to do these items. For example, as long as they have standing orders in place they can place the order before the patient ever walks in the room to see a provider. Now, when the provider is actually seeing the patient, he or she has all the relevant information about him or her to really make the best care decisions for the patient.