Case Study: University of Louisville Physicians

University of Louisville (UofL) Physicians is the largest, multi-specialty physician practice in Louisville with more than 78 subspecialties, 1,200 dedicated staff professionals and over 700 primary care and specialist physicians. They realized that manually entering test results was very time consuming and wanted a solution. Here’s their story.

We teamed up with Phillip F. Bressoud, MD, FCAP the Associate Professor of Medicine and Executive Director Campus Health Services at the University of Louisville Physicians, Kentucky — one of our longest-standing clients — to create a case study to gain an understanding of exactly how beneficial Relaymed has been in saving time and increasing satisfaction. What did we discover?

Read on for a quick 1 minute summary. Or grab a coffee and take some more time to read the full case study in detail.

UofL success

• 39,738 test results saved directly to their EHR!
• 2,980 hours of staff time saved
• $47,680 saved in staffing costs
• $85,437 saved in provider costs

Why?

Managing point-of-care testing (POCT) into the EHR had long been a frustrating aspect of Dr. Bressoud’s day-to-day workflow at UofL. They’ve been with Allscripts TouchWorks for the past seven years and while the likes of strep or mono tests are fairly straightforward to handle, more complex tests (i.e. urinalysis) were found to be extremely time-consuming. With 10+ parameters to enter, results couldn’t always be logged immediately and consultations were being advanced using paper printouts. This posed a series of problems.

“Very early on we realized that scanning or entering Urinalysis results was very, very time-consuming. If you don’t scan them soon enough they fade, they’re hard to read. It’s a nuisance. We were interested in looking for solutions.”

This manual method of running POC testing was becoming a strain on the providers and staff within the group. The whole procedure was adding so much inefficiency through additional admin to the practice workflow.

A solution was required and was available to them on the Allscripts Application Store.

The search for solutions

“We initially started looking for LIS options but since we’re an outpatient multi-specialty group we don’t actually have our own lab, have pockets of instruments. It’d be a whole other computer system to manage and our IT staff are already overwhelmed. It’s overkill for what we needed.”

A laboratory information system (LIS) has too many features, most of which have no place outside of acute care. Therefore, with no centralized lab, the use of an LIS wasn’t going to be feasible. It would become a strain on the practice — particularly those in IT.

They were struggling with how much it was going to take to solve this problem. That’s when they found Relaymed — the true POC connectivity solution.

The Relaymed impact

Implementing Relaymed has transformed their workflow. By automating the point-of-care testing process at UofL Physicians, results flow from instruments automatically and instantly into the EHR.

Staff now run a test and they walk away. It’s sitting there ready for the provider to review. It really is seamless, it’s seconds for it to appear. Easy to get multiparameter tests in now, that’s huge for us.

What’s more, Relaymed also ensures that there are no transcription errors as manual data entry into the EHR has been eliminated and all results go to the correct patient, plus it’s not going to enter a result for somebody with no reason to have a result.

One thing Dr. Bressoud pointed out, which is close to his heart, is that Relaymed made his staff happier. They were no longer required to spend additional, unproductive labor documenting POC results. Before onboarding with Relaymed, these stacks of printouts had become a constant hassle.

However, when you think about this in time savings, Relaymed comes into its own. Since rolling out in August 2016, Relaymed has saved 39,738 test results to Allscripts TouchWorks EHR for the University of Louisville. Documenting results manually is a needlessly laborious process taking an average of 3.5 minutes to document each test result manually. Scanning the result at a later date then accounted for a further 1 minute!

Just 13 UA tests was using 1 hour of staff time to process.

More time for staff AND providers

As staff can now run the test and walk away, they have time to spend on productive tasks. They can be busy checking in patients, checking out patients, doing referrals — which is a hugely important task that needs time dedicated to it. Plus they don’t have a stack of labs to scan at the end of the day. That’s been a big change.

The time savings for staff is only part of the picture — the provider time savings make up the rest. Before implementing Relaymed, they had to sign-off each test again in the EHR, even though they’d already seen the printout in the appointment. This additional admin from extra steps in the workflow was costing at least 1 minute of their time per test — which seems little but when you consider the 39,738 tests, accounts for 662 hours.

Relaymed has brought huge results to various aspects of UofL’s business. So, would Dr. Bressoud recommend it?

Sure, I’d recommend Relaymed. As it’s priced per provider, per month, it’s inexpensive to roll out. It’s made a big difference.

Schedule a 1:1 demo today

If you would like to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Bressoud and UofL, and se how Relaymed can help you, then start with a 15-minute live online demo. Our specialists will talk you through how Relaymed can save your business hours.