Care orchestration is the intelligent automation and precise coordination of care processes to optimize their performance. It guides the care team and patients along a coordinated care journey, ensuring the right tasks are executed at the right time and productivity is maximized. It provides a better experience for the patient and clinicians and produces better outcomes.
To do this properly requires the integration of data from multiple sources, the application of clinical knowledge in real-time, and the efficient utilization of automation to individualize the care of every patient.
Here we dive deeper into how and why we should orchestrate care.
Why is care orchestration important?
Traditional care coordination is labor-intensive, expensive, and highly variable across care teams and sites of care, and it just doesn’t scale across departments, organizations, and locations. A new approach is needed.
Care better coordinated is care better delivered, and the benefits are enormous:
- Boosting productivity by increasing care team capacity, reducing human error, and eliminating waste.
- Streamlining patient experience by blending physical and virtual care into a single, safe, personalized experience.
- Shoring up revenue by keeping patients engaged, maximizing reimbursable activity, and proactively addressing care gaps.
How to orchestrate care?
Automated processes must consider each patient’s unique needs, including how they prefer to engage and how comfortable and proficient they are with digital technology.
From an operational point of view, it’s easy to do this as “one-size-fits-all,” where every patient is treated the same way, but that’s expensive and inefficient and won’t give us the patient-centered care we need. The right thing is to personalize to the needs of each patient, but the operational burden of having processes that change based on every patient is a real issue.
Using technologies that interact with patients on a personalized level will allow health systems to differentiate, boost patient confidence, and deliver the highest quality of care while keeping costs down.
Simply relying on the EHR alone will not be sufficient, as these systems were not built to meet the personalized and dynamic needs of individual patients. While the EHR is excellent at tracking regulatory points, billing, and documentation, providers need a tool that can analyze and recommend what a particular patient needs at a specific point in time.
An overlay orchestration platform is required —sitting on top of an EHR— that can sensitively understand each patient’s specific needs, task the right care team members with the right actions to meet those needs, and produce timely feedback loops, thereby creating an individualized care journey. Such personalization boosts patients’ confidence and satisfaction in their care experience while increasing providers’ efficiency and controlling costs.
At the heart of the orchestration platform, an orchestration engine combined with a comprehensive deployment methodology enables health systems to describe the care journeys in a programmable pathway language and use these to drive consistent and predictable care for every patient without human intervention.
Listen to Robbie Hughes, CEO and Founder of Lumeon talk more about care orchestration.
