Chronic Disease Management Tool Facilitates Communication among Healthcare Staff

An updated disease management tool streamlines communication between physicians and healthcare staff, improving the quality of care given to chronic care patient populations.

The CareManager 3.5 tool uses collaborative technology such as secure messaging to help physicians cost-effectively streamline their approach to chronic care, maintain timely communication with patients, and share critical preventative and intervention information. Population-wide disease management is available for a comprehensive set of chronic conditions based on the General Electric (GE; Crotonville, NY, USA) Centricity electronic medical record (EMR) system. This allows healthcare facilities to risk stratify patients based on process compliance and clinical outcomes.

A series of chronic care management modules allow the management of entire chronic populations with key health information pulled from the existing EHR. Among the modules available are Diabetes, Coronary Heart Disease, Stroke Prevention, Cancer Screening, Congestive Heart Failure, Osteoporosis, Asthma, and drug safety issues. The planned interventions are based on color coded, patient-specific dashboards, which are sent via traditional mail or secure email.

The chronic management tool assists physicians in providing effective patient-centered and population-based chronic care, achieving better patient compliance, and improving outcomes without adding additional staff. This helps increase organizational revenue by ensuring timely interventions and preventative care, and enables self-monitoring and assessment. CareManager is also a certified U.S. Medicare Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) registry for data submission to the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which allows organizations to use a single submission for all eligible patients and providers. The CareManager 3.5 chronic management tool is a product of Kryptiq (Hillsboro, OR, USA).

"Without CareManager, it would be difficult for me to know how effectively we're treating our patients with chronic disease," said Timothy Miller, M.D., a family medicine physician at Decatur Memorial Hospital (IL, USA). "It's an issue of quality--quality of the care I provide, and the communication I have with patients."

"CareManager complements the open network of collaboration that Kryptiq's customers are utilizing to bring real change, efficiency, and quality to the U.S. healthcare system," said Luis Machuca, president and CEO of Kryptiq. "As the industry increasingly invests in health IT, the resulting technology must present meaningful use, delivering the best clinical and financial outcomes for providers and patients."

Related Links:
Kryptiq
General Electric