04-13-2019, 08:00 AM
PatientPing Transforms Care for High-Risk, High-Utilizing Patients Across North Carolina through its Care Coordination Platform
Health technology company powers statewide efforts to improve care for patients struggling with substance abuse and behavioral health disorders
Among these initiatives is the North Carolina Emergency Department Peer Support Program for Improving Response to Opioid Overdose. NCHA announced the program in the Spring of 2018, which is funded by the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services in an effort to support those faced with Opioid Use Disorder (OUD). The participating health systems and community providers are leveraging PatientPing’s technology and analytics to decrease the number of opioid-related ED visits and deaths across the state, which have nearly doubled since 2010. Participants in the program include Carolinas Healthcare System Northeast, Cone Health, Southeast Regional Medical Center, UNC Hospital, and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. The grant program enables participating hospitals to have peer support specialists work within their EDs to provide support to patients who present with substance abuse issues and provide assistance during the recovery process.
“We are excited to be collaborating with our data business partner, PatientPing, to support statewide efforts to address the opioid abuse crisis,” said Steve Lawler, president of North Carolina Healthcare Association. “With PatientPing’s technology, our healthcare providers will be equipped to better monitor patients in the emergency department who may be struggling with substance abuse and behavioral health challenges.”
Emergency Departments have the option to leverage PatientPing’s Stories product, which provides critical patient context to providers at the point of care, in order to facilitate screening for at-risk patients to be consulted by their peers. PatientPing also provides monthly, de-identified reports to measure program success including ED utilization, unique ED’s visited and frequency, participant demographics, and admission statistics.
“We’re thrilled to be expanding our partnership efforts with the North Carolina Healthcare Association and to be providing support to such a transformative and critical initiative such as the Opioid Peer Support Program,” said Jay Desai, CEO of PatientPing. “We’re proud of all that we have been able to accomplish with NCHA through our partnership, and to be continuing our efforts of improving care across North Carolina and playing our role in curbing the devastating impact of substance use disorder.”
Many other initiatives are underway across the state to improve coordination and collaboration between providers. Complex patients’ care plans and therapy notes are pushed to ED doctors directly in their electronic health record workflows, nephrology practices are being notified when patients are using ED instead of clinics, and home health agencies are proactively helping patients transition home from hospital settings.
Organizations using the tool include North Carolina Nephrology, a specialty practice located in Raleigh, North Carolina, which uses PatientPing to transition unnecessary ED visits back to clinics, reduce readmission rates, and direct patients to appropriate care settings. In just three months of using the PatientPing platform, North Carolina Nephrology was able to assist over 1,700 end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients who were using the ED.
Health plans leveraging the PatientPing tool in North Carolina include Humana, one of the nation’s leading health and well-being companies. With access to the platform, health plans are able to monitor member movement in real time as they transition across emergency, inpatient, and post-acute care settings and enable care teams to coordinate care more effectively, identify and close gaps in care, and ensure appropriate and immediate connectivity to primary or behavioral health care.
“Our statewide efforts across North Carolina are just a glimpse into what we are striving to accomplish here at PatientPing,” said Desai. “We are committed to connecting providers across the continuum to seamlessly coordinate patient care. We are excited to continue expanding our network, existing partnerships and service offerings to improve care across the nation.”
PatientPing's network includes tens of thousands of providers, and is rapidly accelerating its nationwide expansion so that any providers who share patients anywhere in the country can coordinate care with one another.
About PatientPing
PatientPing is a Boston-based care coordination platform that reduces the cost of healthcare by seamlessly connecting providers to coordinate patient care. The platform allows providers to collaborate on shared patients through Pings–real-time notifications when patients receive care–and Stories–important patient context at the point of care–and allows provider organizations, payers, governments, individuals and the organizations supporting them to leverage this real-time data to reach their shared goals of improving the efficiency of our healthcare system. For more information, please visit www.patientping.com.