How Device Automation Can Improve Urology Practices

From our experience, urology practices are amongst the busiest and most stressful environments in the healthcare industry, given the high volume of patients, all of which require a urinalysis test.

Adding to this considerable effort is the relative complexity of urinalysis testing, which must be conducted at the point-of-care through devices (such as the CLINITEK Status analyzer). Providing this service improves clinical outcomes, as is an expectation of modern healthcare, however, it presents a number of obstacles that must be overcome by each practice when suitable systems aren’t in place.

Processing numerous urinalysis results each day, under stringent time conditions, leads to problems with data accuracy, staff workflow and patient experience. Together, these factors can have a detrimental effect on your practice’s efficiency, which impacts revenue and reputation.

Difficulties With POCT Urinalysis Results

Achieving urology practice efficiency may seem like an almost insurmountable challenge, given the complexities that are involved with this form of medicine. Each urinalysis result includes 10 or more analytes—for instance, glucose and protein levels—plus details regarding the color and clarity of the sample. These criteria have multiple possible answers, including either a numerical or positive/negative value that a member of staff must document before an appointment can continue. As you can understand, this is a laborious, complicated task and, given that it must be completed several times a day—alongside that member of staff’s already busy work schedule—it creates significant issues with urology practice efficiency.

Every result takes 2 minutes to manually process into the EHR. So every 30 UA tests wastes one hour of staff time. This relies on the staff member being instantly available to type in the results once analysis is complete. In reality, they could be busy performing another task, which could lead to delays of up to 10-minutes before the result is available for the provider in the EHR. This time is reflected in appointments, which taints the patient experience in turn, by reducing valuable time with their provider. These hindrances to urology practice efficiency are further amplified by the potential for error involved in transcription, which poses a huge problem when audits come around.

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

By connecting each point-of-care device to your EHR with Relaymed, you can automate the process of urinalysis testing. Once a sample is processed, the results appear instantaneously in your EHR, without any need for manual data entry. This takes away the aspects of point-of-care urinalysis testing that cause so much difficulty and allows staff to concentrate on value-adding tasks.

You’ll be surprised by the staff cost that practices currently devote to urinalysis testing, when automation is not in place. Considering that LPNs, RNs, MAs and Lab Techs (i.e. the members of staff that are commonly required in point-of-care result processing) cost an average of $16/hour, you can see how the costs can quickly add up when so much of their time is devoted solely to processing test results. Add to this the tedium of repeating the rushed process of test result entry, and the corresponding improvements to patient experience, and you can unlock an improvement to the human experience on both sides of the process also.

And It’s So Simple

Relaymed integrates seamlessly into the workflow of a practice—to the extent that you’ll barely notice it’s there. Ultimately, utilizing it in your practice means one less thing for staff members to worry about in the short-term, when data entry gets in the way of other value-adding tasks, and in the long-term, when transcription errors lead to reproval and/or revenue loss following an audit.

Due to our knowledge of urology practices, this has been an area of focus for Relaymed. By partnering with the market leader Siemens, we can connect to their CLINITEK urology testing device instantaneously, which is good news for urology practices that want to improve workflow efficiency (but don’t worry, we can work with any device on the market). As a result, we are now the industry leader in urology device automation and we are ready to get to work in your practice.

Download the Ebook

Once these various efficiency gains and administrative improvements are unlocked by Relaymed, your practice will immediately benefit financially.

Download our ebook How to quantify the financial benefits of automating POCT, to find out more about the value that automating your point-of-care workflow can bring to your practice.