Care Coordination: How to Use the Strengths of Your Team

Your care team is your number one asset in providing exceptional patient care. This is especially true when it comes to primary healthcare teams.

While recruiting exceptional individuals is important too, it’s the strength of the team that truly matters. Sometimes, knowing how to use each individual’s strengths effectively can be challenging. Other times, it can be downright frustrating.

In smaller organizations, it’s even more important to be able to work as a team. You don’t want your highly-trained specialists performing administrative duties like sending reminder emails.

In this article, you will discover how to enhance care coordination for healthcare teams. Learn how to best utilize your care team’s strengths to improve patient satisfaction, increase revenue, and save valuable time.

Care coordination in primary healthcare

Primary healthcare extends beyond the scope of traditional medicine to include behavioral health and socioeconomic influences. For example, a person’s education, income, housing, and lifestyle will be addressed under a primary healthcare model. This results in better patient outcomes, reduced healthcare costs to the population, and increased revenue for healthcare providers.

Healthcare models like these—which address the whole person—produce better outcomes for patients but add complexity to the delivery of care. Coordinating between many different members of staff, various organizations, and patients can become a real challenge for healthcare teams.

In order to deliver the best quality of care, Care Management organizations must put systems in place to manage the multifaceted aspects of primary healthcare.

Care Management Solutions: making the most of your team

An online management resource is a necessary solution for coordinating your care team. It will help make the most of your team’s strengths by coordinating all necessary communication and administrative functions, leaving your staff free to focus on what they do best. Additionally, an online management resource can help foster collaboration among team members at an unprecedented level.

How will online tools help coordinate your care team?

Online tools help coordinate your care team by facilitating communication between any care team members and their patients while protecting patient data rights and complying with HIPAA.

All the communication tools your care team could need will be in one place. This prevents workers from having to switch back and forth between platforms or tools.

In a typical situation, a healthcare provider would meet a patient, record some information in their chart, contact another provider on their phone or pager, and then potentially share data with a different team member in another organization, too. With an online tool, all of this information can be streamlined, eliminating the need for so many tools to record and share the same essential data.

In other words, an online tool acts as a centralized space for patients, doctors, and other care team members to access information and communicate with one another. This also eliminates the need to repeat information and allows the whole team to keep track of patient goals. Everything becomes much more efficient as primary healthcare objectives are more easily tracked.

Online tools for healthcare organizations to facilitate care coordination

Welkin is a software company that is laser-focused on empowering healthcare organizations to deliver exceptional patient care. Since this is a healthcare company first, Welkin truly understands what needs to happen within your organization to facilitate exceptional care coordination.

Welkin offers a three-tiered pass system with problems, goals, and interventions. This allows you to assign different professionals to various aspects of patient care while centralizing all communication and data on a given patient. The system also makes it easy for all providers involved in patient care to see progress toward their intended outcomes.

Additionally, Welkin allows for the creation of custom workflows within the company. For example, a patient might see one person for intake, another person for assessment, and another for consultation. By creating custom workflows, you can standardize this process for any type of patient. With Welkin, you can truly have efficient, interdisciplinary teamwork.

Case study: how Face It TOGETHER used online tools for successful care coordination

Face It TOGETHER is a company that allows patients to meet with counselors so they can overcome addictions. They leverage the power of big data in order to track patient outcomes and measure progress. They needed a platform to centralize data collection, update and retrieve data in real time while communicating with patients, and easily see trends in patients’ success.

After a trial period with Salesforce Health Cloud and Welkin, Face It TOGETHER ultimately moved forward with Welkin’s online management tool to facilitate their patient care. They cited the following reasons for making their selection:

• Welkin has the ability to send assessments directly to patients.
• Welkin’s display is visually less clunky.
• With Welkin, there was no need to involve a third-party developer to accomplish their goals.
• Salesforce Health Cloud had no integrated communication tools, whereas Welkin did.
• The interface was intuitive and easy for users to understand—especially the timeline

Face It TOGETHER was ultimately very satisfied with their care coordination platform after choosing to use Welkin’s innovative and user-friendly suite of online tools.

Choose Welkin for your team’s care coordination

By implementing a holistic primary healthcare approach to patient care, everybody wins. Patients receive better care and better outcomes, while healthcare providers are less likely to experience burnout. However, an efficient care coordination system is necessary for healthcare teams to thrive under this model.

Welkin helps you organize the way you do your work. This goes beyond just features. It empowers program directors to shape the way their care teams work through tasks, allowing them to oversee an effective workflow among their care team while still allowing for proper relationship building.

Find out more about how Welkin can help your healthcare team coordinate its care.