The Visiting Nurses Association (VNA) of Rhode Island uses Cerner Home Healthcare as its electronic medical record solution. Now, the VNA has integrated CellTrak VisitManager with Cerner to add a mobile dimension to their services.
Rhode Island's VNA has three basic tenets: to care for the sick at home, to promote good health and to prevent illness in the community. Although the organization was created to provide medical care for low-income patients in 1900, the VNA has evolved to serve patients of all income levels and ages.
Switching to a mobile solution equipped with GPS tracking has had multiple benefits for the VNA. Primarily, GPS tracking has eliminated mileage self-reporting, significantly cutting mileage reimbursement expenses.
Also, GPS tracking replaces interactive voice response (IVR) as a means of tracking the locations of visiting nurses. Knowing where nurses are at all times and using that information to redeploy them as needed has improved communication and reassured the VNA of nurses' safety.
"Having the latest technology to better communicate with staff and patients has created improved messaging across our care teams," explained Steve Doughty, the VNA's IT Manager.
"We decided to make the move from IVR to a mobile GPS solution based on knowing where our staff is at all times. Knowing where my staff is creates better accountability and we rest assured knowing they are safe."
Within VisitManager, Schedule Management capabilities deliver push notification for changes in appointment times and reduce numbers of missed visits. The GPS-enabled mobile device checks the staff in for the day without requiring them to visit the home office, thus cutting payroll expenses.
Staff can also send configurable alerts for changes to visits (e.g., missed, short, delayed).
Electronic Documentation and Visit Verification allow the same patient to be seen by a single provider multiple times. Visiting nurses can also complete care plans and monitor vital measurements between visits.
The VisitManager Portal enables note sharing between staff and delivers alerting and exceptions handling. Reporting includes performance scorecards as well as trending metrics within the agency.
The Rhode Island VNA also conducts a TeleHealth program. The award-winning staff has been recognized for low patient re-hospitalization rates, high scores in patient satisfaction and positive outcomes for patients.
Edited by
Braden Becker
