Alert Fatigue? Not In Central New York!
HealtheConnections’ Unique Delivery Methods Make a Difference.
HealtheConnections (HeC) offers the healthcare community diverse and unique ways to receive patient alerts. With more than 300 organizations and 2000 providers receiving alerts, it became obvious that we needed to create a way for each to choose their own combination of how and when to be notified of patient events. We listened to our providers about the potential constant stream of alerts and developed both push and pull strategies as choices to best fit with alert recipient workflows.
There are three facets of alerts that HeC used as the basis of its alerting infrastructure: type of alert, triggering criteria, and delivery method. HeC started out with the basic alert types of Emergency Department (ED) Admit, Inpatient Admit, and Inpatient Discharge. Medication Adherence and ED Admits within the Last 30 Days are alerts that were added to enhance the choices available to our participants.
A participating organization can also choose the triggering criteria by which it wants to receive alerts. First, a consent-based trigger can be selected and an alert will be sent for any patient with a “yes” consent for that organization. A subscription list can also be used to reduce the number of alerts to a selected subset of patients. Lastly, another choice is to receive a provider-based alert. Similar to results delivery, an alert will be sent to a participating provider when named on a patient’s record.
HealtheConnections’ unique approach to alerts is mainly in its delivery methods. As with most “push” alerting methods, HeC can send a notification via text, email, or Direct Mail to a recipient. These real-time alerts can be most useful for care management to address a patient’s needs as soon as possible. However, the real difference for HeC participants is to “pull” alerts when they need them within their workflow. For these types of alerts, HealtheConnections offers myAlerts, which is a comprehensive list of alerts that is filterable and has delegation capability to others within the participating organization to access. Another key distinction as a delivery method is the Daily Digest, which is a summary of alerts for the last 24 hours that is available by 6:30am every morning. Ninety percent of HeC’s alerts are delivered via Daily Digest and myAlerts.
HealtheConnections will continue to innovate solutions with more custom-based alerts in the future and other features that best meet our healthcare community’s needs.
