axialHealthcare launches new internal HIPAA-compliant phone platform for its clinical care team to increase provider and patient outreach efficiency and enhance client reporting
A multi-team effort, Consult Connect allows axialHealthcare’s Clinical Consult Services (CCS) team, comprised of licensed clinical pharmacists, engagement specialists, and behavioral health coaches, the ability to now make and receive calls to patients and providers through a single HIPAA-compliant platform. Consult Connect seamlessly integrates into the clinical care team’s application that prioritizes and documents outreach, which is called Consult.
A crucial component to the success of axialHealthcare’s clients and their respective providers and members, CCS ensures practitioners within a specific health plan network are familiar with axialHealthcare’s various pain care and opioid therapy resources available within the company’s practitioner portal, including patient risk alerts, evidence-based care pathways, and a referral network of high-quality and appropriate cost advanced pain care providers and medication-assisted treatment centers. The clinical care team engages via telephone and in-person visits, providing expert consultation in cases of escalating patient risk.
Created using Amazon Web Service’s Amazon Connect platform, this project was no small feat and required the combined efforts of axialHealthcare’s Client Reporting, Research & Development, Engineering, and CCS departments. Daryle Dowell, Director of Client Reporting, said, “It’s encouraging to see a cross-functional team working together to ensure success. [We] will be able to report at more granular levels, giving us additional insight into how to better serve our clients, and the enhanced data capture will also open up additional analytic opportunities.”
The ultimate goal of Consult Connect is to allow CCS to focus on the provider interaction, unburdened by tedious data entry during the conversation, while still capturing the rich details of the interaction for client reporting and further analysis. That said, all of the downstream benefits of Consult Connect are significant. They include:
- Allowing outreach via one universal platform across the entire CCS team, including remote pharmacists outside of axialHealthcare’s headquarters in Tennessee.
- Recording calls to enable data mining, transcription, and quality assurance.
- Reducing the administrative burden to the CCS team.
- Providing axialHealthcare’s Research & Development department near real-time access to outreach and call data.
- Maintaining HIPAA compliance in a cloud-based telephone solution.
- Facilitating future telehealth capabilities, including integration with Empower, axialHealthcare’s patient-facing mobile app.
- Preparing for future advanced data extraction methods found in natural language processing and sentiment analysis.
To Stacey Grant, VP of clinical operations, enhanced efficiency is paramount. “By decreasing the administrative burden, the clinical consult team [can] focus their time on supporting patients and providers. Ease of use will trickle down […] in the form of increased provider and patient satisfaction during the engagement and education process.”
Lindsey Morris, director of data science and analytics, is excited about the possibilities for future product development, noting that “the sky’s the limit when it comes to data exploration here. A couple examples include: studying the correlation between outreach time and patient outcomes and using data collected from calls as features in predictive models.”