The dizzy whirlwind of living through and experiencing a global pandemic is a newfound reality for all of us. Each day it continues to evolve, and for now we continue to face even greater uncertainty. Despite the unprecedented times we’re facing, one thing remains the same with our customers. That is how dedicated they have been at fiercely and bravely combating COVID-19 on the frontlines and from behind the scenes as they deploy tactics, processes and operations to ensure they’re keeping their hospitals running smoothly and protecting their patients, families and communities.
Crisis and chaos calls for action. We’re continuing to work with clients who sprang into action early at the onset. Particularly, Care Managers, Directors and IT Analysts who work with our Care Management solution. This is because our customers across acute care hospitals, community access hospitals and health systems have been able to utilize our comprehensive
MorCare Care Management (MCCM) solution in various ways to help with their efforts throughout this challenging time. The value and power of MorCare’s enterprise software solution suite right now is in our unique ability to be agile, responsive and to provide easy configuration options. In times like this, we’re proud to say for many of our customers this has been impactful. This begs the question, is your care management tool versatile and adaptive enough to serve your needs in times like these?
How our customers have utilized MCCM to serve their needs during COVID-19 to help others.
Quick examples at a glance:
– A Large Health System: Utilizing Multipurpose Documentation, Discharge Preparation and Quick Configuration Alerts for COVID-19 = Useful Impact
– Sarasota Memorial Health System: Creative COVID-19 Solutions Using MCCM
– Sharing is Caring: Knowledge sharing and live webinar on How to Manage Your COVID-19 Population
– MorCare Assembles Customer Tutorials and Toolkit to Support COVID-19 Efforts
A Large Health System is Utilizing MCCM with Multipurpose Documentation, Discharge Preparation and Quick Configuration Alerts for COVID-19 = Useful Impact:
An industry giant and recognized health leader for the COVID-19 crisis recognized the need to communicate a patient’s COVID-19 status quickly and accurately to all members of the care team. They created automated alerts using EMR data to identify COVID-19 positive and COVID-19 tested patients within MCCM. This large health system leveraged the power of the MorCare real-time HL7 interface from their EMR, allowing them to bring newly created COVID flags into MCCM. This new data now triggers automatic ‘Alerts’ within MorCare’s Care Management system for COVID-19 positive and COVID-19 tested patients.
Having both the COVID Testing alert and COVID Positive alert are helping this health system with visibility and planning in this more complex landscape. Here are a few more specifics on how they have used MCCM and why:
1) Created a new outcome code tied specifically to the Medicare COVID Waiver. An alert will allow users to check the use of, and proper documentation around the application of this outcome code, in preparation for any potential future RAC activity
2) Although there are additional tools within this particular health system for this, a MCCM alert provides Utilization Management users a general or partial sense of the patient load and trend in units.
3) Alerts will help quality assurance reporting around COVID-related denial trending. Most importantly, it enables direct reporting against MCCM-specific data directly from Crystal reports and reduced turnaround time eliminating need to extract data from EMR. This will also continue to help protect SNF and post-acute populations from infection.
4) Having created and using the flags allows for better preparation around case management and discharge planning as testing alerts on positive patients can prompt activity, and reporting on COVID clearance testing could prompt staging for discharge, etc.
5) Billholds queues in EMRs may be impacted by the waiver and may be piling up. There is now great opportunity in utilizing alert-fed extracts to help any automated release efforts underway.
Sarasota Memorial Health System Leads by Example in Discharge Planning:
Our long-time customer Sarasota Memorial Health System acted immediately on the additional challenges being faced during COVID-19 and brainstormed a plan to tailor existing workflows in MCCM to include a COVID-19 tracking document in the ‘Discharge Planning Topics and User Defined’ area. As a result of their expertise in utilizing the MCCM system they were quick to create and deploy a ‘User Defined Tab’ in their Discharge Planning screen. This allows Discharge Planners to capture information about COVID-19 exposure upon admission, and then update information upon discharge. This swift and strategic configuration enabled the ability to start tracking the admission source for the COVID-19 patients, as well as the Discharge Location, thus giving a window of insight to the whole organization based on the data they receive. This additional information has been helping Sarasota Memorial better understand the trends of the virus as it impacts their hospitals.
Above are great examples of how flexible adaptation of MorCare’s Care Management tool met the current and immediate needs of these organizations. Customers have local control of the application, giving them the opportunity to respond quickly to issues and situations as they arise within their health system.
MorCare is Committed to Customer Needs and Knowledge Sharing:
Supporting our customers is our top priority. To help ensure our customers understand the many ways they can utilize their care management system in times of crisis, we offered our personal assistance We distributed a virtual toolkit, to ensure customers have access to tutorial videos on how to easily configure aspects within their systems and utilize features of the solution in different ways and for different means.
MorCare was also excited to connect with customers via an informative webinar How to Manage Your COVID-19 Population with MorCare. A sincere note of thanks and gratitude to Greg Borden at Sarasota Memorial Healthcare who was a guest presenter. Not only did we share tips, tricks and how-to’s, we were lucky enough to have Greg join us and share the Sarasota example on how his team has utilized MCCM features, along with how other customers can leverage that information to put these practices in place.
If you have any questions about MCCM or the benefits of a Care Management solution, please
contact us.
Authored by: Andrea Evans
