My colleague Rob Arnold and I recently published Frost & Sullivan’s latest research on Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP); customers can download it at www.frost.com. The biggest take-away: Plenty of vendors have plenty to say about CEBP, but very few can point to customers that are actually deploying and using such deeply integrated technology.
Carefx, founded in 2002 and headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, is a great example. The company develops software to improve the user experience and workflows within healthcare organizations. Its solutions give clinicians access to patient and care information, in a unified client, even if the data are stored in multiple disparate systems. They also automate critical workflows and help providers analyze patient-care and other business data.
Recently, Carefx leveraged Avaya’s Agile Communication Environment (ACE) to develop communications enabled business processes (CEBP) for the healthcare industry. These solutions inject communications into certain healthcare processes, to help practitioners locate specialists and experts, speed decision making, streamline workflows, and improve patient care.
The goal is to give practitioners at large hospitals and clinic facilities a portal from which they can easily access information and expertise. The solution unifies patient and clinical information, and automates workflows across multiple systems and entities. By embedding presence and click-to-call capabilities within the portal and its various data systems, the solution makes it easy for clinicians to communicate with their colleagues--something that's particularly difficult to do in a hospital environment, since practitioners are constantly moving around the facility and may have several contact points and telephone numbers. This reality is often complicated by the fact that teams often have one cell phone among them, on which they take emergency calls; it can be difficult to know who has the phone at any given time--or whether that person is the right one to answer a critical question as soon as it arises.
Qi Li, Executive VP of Global Clinical Strategy for Carefx, says there are three key areas for improvement he talks about with customers to help them understand the value of the CEBP solution:
1. Consultations: Practitioners often need to consult with specialists and other colleagues on patient care. But they may not know who the on-call attending is, or whether he or she is available to answer questions at any given time. Using presence information and click-to-call capabilities, the Carefx solution lets doctors and nurses click on an icon representing a group of experts--say, the on-call cardiologists for the shift--then reach the one who is available and able to take a call.
2. Case Management: Every patient has a permanent care physician, but it can be hard to know who that is, and it is complicated by the fact that many patients also have attending and admitting physicians--not to mention a cadre of specialists, depending on the complexity of the case. That info is related to the patient, and travels with him or her, but it is not easy to find in a paper file, or if it resides in different care-giving systems. With the Carefx system, getting patient updates and histories to all involved providers is streamlined; click-to-call capabilities then make it easy for practitioners to reach out to one another as needed, without having to hunt for their contact information or current location.
3. Patient Discharge: When a patient gets discharged, several rounds of sign-offs and verifications must get done, with various practitioners needing to give the green light. That can be a lengthy and complicated process, but speeding it up is critical from a financial perspective; miss the discharge window, and the patient stays another day. By making it easy for discharge managers to find and connect with the appropriate people in as timely a manner as possible reduces the time it takes to discharge the patient. The resulting shortened length of stay is purely due to administrative efficiency, with no reduction in inpatient care.
Sounds great, right? But here's the catch: Carefx has just one customer deploying the technology, and another in the "considering it" stage. Indeed, despite the benefits of its applications, Li admits that it has been a challenge to sell healthcare organizations on CEBP. Never quick to adopt new technology, many hospital and clinic personnel are caregivers first and foremost. So it's crucial to help them understand how wrapping communications into a business process is key to market success.
It's also worth noting that many providers are still using paper-based systems; for them CEBP can't happen until they update the rest of their infrastructure, which will likely take years to fully complete.
And that's the thing about CEBP. So many companies are still in the process of deploying basic UC solutions--presence and chat, conferencing, even VoIP--that integrating them with their business applications is still months, or even years, away.
