Dr. Mark Sears, the Chief Medical Officer for Orange Blossom Family Health (OBFH), walked into the lobby of the company’s Kissimmee, Florida location on a typical morning and froze in his tracks. The room was filled with first-time patients, as evident by the 15 pages of health records and consent forms they were hurriedly filling out so they could be seen.
He approached an older gentleman and asked him how long he had been waiting. The man expressed his frustration as he explained his process of waiting for an hour, much of it taken filling out all the forms and looking up the required data. “Isn’t there an easier way to check in?” the man asked Dr. Sears.
When he got back to his office, Mark Sears sat at his desk in deep contemplation. How could his office properly care for its target market of under and uninsured patients when they were getting stuck in the waiting room trying to fill out paperwork? Added to the time of filling out the paperwork, his staff then manually entered the information into the Electronic Medical Record system. As far as Mark saw it, there was one option: fix their client-care relationship, and quickly. They had considered implementing Epic, an all-in-one digital solution for clients to virtually check-in, self–schedule, and complete pre-visit tasks electronically. But how should he implement Epic with little experience in such an undertaking?
If Sears implemented the software incorrectly, it might cause patients and staff to leave. As a nonprofit Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC), they had to consider current and forecasted funding from government grants to pay for software or certain features and choose the most impactful ones correctly. To guarantee funding from grants, the number of patients and quality care metrics needed to be maintained at a certain level. If OBFH mismanaged or overspent its attempt to implement an industry-disrupting technology, their customers might be lost, grants would dry up and OBFH could go under.
Sears knew they had their work cut out for them since the cost, the risk of failure, software options and the implementation would all make the decision far from simple. But as he reflected on the frustration seen in the patient lobby that morning, he knew the current process was not viable for a growing number of clients and they owed it to their patients and community to do better. Could he deliver on his promise to his patients?
Authors: Gabriel Calar, Jermaine Forrest, Katrina Hippleheuser, Steven Michaelis
Link: https://doi.org/10.28945/5292
Cite As: Calar, G., Forrest, J., Hippleheuser, K., & Michaelis, S. (2024). Navigating a path to integrated health care. Muma Case Review 9(5). 1-22. https://doi.org/10.28945/5292