Connected Care in a Connected World

This session will discuss the elements of Connected Care, a breakthrough in the improvement of care delivery. Connected Care is the sharing of clinical information inside your organization, with other providers, and patients themselves in an effort to provide high quality care. Besides improving the continuity of care and promoting quality care, it reduces medication errors, improves efficiency, and enables patients to be more involved in their care process. The initial step toward a Connected Care environment is to link and automate internal clinical processes with scheduling, billing/finance and other internal processes and systems. Automating key clinical functions and sharing the data with other departments can provide exponential process improvements to a provider organization. Many agencies realize immediate revenue gains by capturing and billing for services that had previously gone unrecorded. A true Connected Care environment includes a health information infrastructure that encompasses the patient's physical and mental health by supporting connections with other agencies involved in the care process, including mental health and primary care facilities. We will discuss and provide examples of how Connected Care requires a review of a provider's current internal business, financial and clinical processes. The goal is to implement processes that support a holistic approach encompassing all modalities of care. A patient may receive care from multiple providers in different situations, and Connected Care can speed up the referral process and provide the patient with more opportunity for quality care with effective information and data sharing, reducing the risk of medical errors and improving efficiencies.