Prairie Pediatrics: Putting Patient Care at the Forefront
Prairie Pediatrics is a healthcare clinic in Sioux City, Iowa. For almost 100 years their team of pediatric physicians and…
Prairie Pediatrics is a healthcare clinic in Sioux City, Iowa. For almost 100 years their team of pediatric physicians and nurses have been focused on providing the highest quality of care to the patients they serve.
We spoke with Sandra Tomlinson, the head of Healthcare IT and Quality Care Manager for Prairie Pediatrics, to hear about her experience in bringing her clinic into the digital world.
Metrics at a Glance
- 3 hours of saved staff time a week
- Reduced unbilled results by 95%
- Reduced waiting time for Physicians by 80%
Counting up the wasted time
As with most physician practices, one of the biggest challenges Prairie Pediatrics faces is the precious time of their staff. As a clinic that relies heavily on urinalysis testing, Prairie Pediatrics was spending hours of staff time manually entering each test result into their Allscripts Professional EHR. Sandra estimated that each test took an average of 3-5 minutes to enter, meaning around 3 hours of wasted staff time each week.
Wasted staff time doesn’t just equate to wasted money, it also affects the quality of care and Prairie Pediatrics has always put the care of its patients above all else.
In addition to the time spent entering results, Sandra was also seeing an issue of unbilled tests due to lost results.
I remember a few years before we got Relaymed having to go through paper charts to try to find any non-billed UA’s because someone forgot to scan in the results. It was just unbelievable.
Looking for a solution to reduce staff burnout and give more time back for patient care, Sandra came across Relaymed when looking at partners that already connected to her Allscripts Professional EHR.
Installing Relaymed
Relaymed came in as a simple solution to help solve the issues that Sandra faced when it came to capturing her urinalysis results. With a pre-existing relationship with Allscripts, Relaymed was able to install, configure and train her on the new process without any heavy lifting.
Sandra recalls that Relaymed walked her through the process of hooking up one instrument and then she was able to install the rest of them and configured everything on my own.
It was really easy to do and so smooth.
As soon as the installation process was done Sandra was able to see her results immediately flowing automatically to her EHR.
Initially when she installed she would go into Relaymed to check to make sure that the results were being sent through but that slowly went away and now Sandra rarely even goes into the application.
Quality focused
Prairie Pediatrics’ focus has always been on quality of care. Sandra says that adding Relaymed to their workflow affected all levels of caregiving within their practice.
It’s like an invisible solution.
Sandra says that with an automated solution the nurses have more time to take those nurse calls and apply quality advice.
And, when the nursing assistants aren’t spending so much time doing busy work, they’re able to pull more patients back which means less time that the patients are in the waiting room and less time for them to be exposed to illness.
And, with the providers, they’re able to treat them more accurately because they have better quality results to get to the diagnosis and they’re not wasting time waiting for the results to get to them.
The staff at Prairie Pediatrics have a strong love for the children they see and the work they do and being able to give time back to focus on their patients is the most important benefit for them. Providing the highest quality of care is what makes Prairie Pediatrics a standout customer.
To learn more about if Relaymed might be a good fit for your practice give us a shout!