How eConsults Increase Quality of Care
AristaMD’s eConsult Platform Offers a Cost-effective Solution to Increase Quality of Care
Specialist recommendations via eConsult specifically address certain medical issues. Patient satisfaction and patient experience are components of quality of care related to specialty medicine. eConsults address social determinants of health, such as OOP costs and travel distances to appointments.
Video Transcript:
“One of the biggest reasons why I would promote AristaMD and using electronic consultations is the quality of care for our patients. There are many ways of approaching the quality of care: making sure your providers are knowledgeable, and that they have the resources to make decisions on care plans. This is a way to do this without the expense, as much, of doing it face to face. It is more direct and influential because it’s specific, and specifically addresses certain medical issues that are more important in the care.
I can’t see why anyone would not want to use it. It’s that important.
You can measure quality by hemoglobin A1Cs, and blood pressure measures. But, there are so many other ways to measure the quality of care. Because the patient has a lot of social determinants of health that affect their health. Those are things like driving to an appointment, taking time off work, and how much things cost. If you can address that part of their healthcare and quality of care, that is just as important as that hemoglobin A1C or that blood pressure or anything else that you can measure. In addressing those aspects of their healthcare, the patients are going to be more compliant with what the plan is if they have more knowledge and if the provider can talk to them about how a specialist is involved in their care.
The bottom line is in the quality of care, but in the other way you measure it, the patient satisfaction, the patient experience. That improves the quality of care [as well].
AristaMD has cited other clients that have experienced a measured decrease in the need for ER intervention. In terms of wait times, using the traditional referral route we have for a segment of our population, it’s going to be another 2 weeks before we can process the referrals that we have been sending. In thinking through that, we say ‘Well, what if we just do an eConsult?.’ If we do an eConsult, usually 12 or 24 hours is more than enough time to get the patient to the next step in the process of their care.”