On June 22, VITAS® Healthcare and Kno2™, a company that optimizes patient document exchange, announced their collaboration to streamline the electronic patient referral process. This two-way hospice referral system is designed to interface with hospital and health system EMR technology, increasing efficiency, reducing hospice response time and eliminating the use of paper which ultimately cuts the ever-increasing costs of care delivery.
VITAS, the nation’s leading provider of end-of-life care, will integrate Kno2’s interoperability platform into its proprietary electronic health record (EHR) system to support centralized and secure sharing of patient data to speed up the referral process. Provided at no cost, the new technology fully satisfies many key CMS requirements and has a zero transcription error rate.
“Our goal is to innovate and accelerate how care is transitioned from hospitals to hospice care,” said Patrick Hale, chief information officer of VITAS. “The partnership with Kno2 will enable our hospice team to work quickly and more efficiently, giving them more time to provide comfort and increasing quality of life for VITAS patients and their families.”
Hospitals typically send referrals to several hospice organizations simultaneously, through diverse methods, to provide patients and their families with a variety of choices that best meet their needs. Through this partnership, VITAS receives all referrals electronically through Kno2’s integrated platform, and is able to dispatch an admission coordinator to the patient’s bedside within minutes, even during nights, weekends and holidays, delivering much-needed comfort and relief to hospice patients and their families.
Yale New Haven Hospital has leveraged VITAS’ integrated solution to expedite patient transitions to end-of-life care. Hospice-appropriate patients are identified within the hospital’s EHR and referred directly to VITAS. Admission coordinators are notified via their mobile device and respond immediately.
