Griffin Health is an independent 160-bed acute care community hospital serving the residents of Connecticut’s Lower Naugatuck Valley Region. Griffin Health is in a highly competitive healthcare market and relies on more than 300 employed and independent doctors who have surgical and admitting privileges.
Streamlining Surgical Care Coordination with Medtel:
In an increasingly competitive healthcare landscape, Griffin Health’s commitment to delivering top-tier care to its community and growing surgical volumes compelled the healthcare provider to seek out new tools to enhance operational efficiencies.
Griffin found a solution in a partnership with Medtel to implement SurgiScript, its platform for surgical care coordination. This collaboration aimed to streamline their surgical processes and establish uniform practices across surgeon offices.
Challenges and Decision to Innovate:
Griffin Health’s surgical bookings relied heavily on faxes and emails. This approach frequently necessitated extensive phone calls to ensure surgical case readiness.
Booking challenges stemmed from communication issues with surgeon’s offices, necessitating time-consuming follow-ups for case information compilation. The inefficient information-sharing system among team members further exacerbated coordination efforts, leading to increased case-handling time and potential cancellations and delays.
“Medtel has been a valued partner in streamlining our surgical services. Our surgeons and staff love the platform.”
Kim Viadero
Surgical Services Administrator
Moreover, Griffin Health was slowed down by manual processes for essential aspects of care coordination, such as managing clinical documentation and site-of-service selections. This reliance affected staff time and increased the potential for booking issues. Without an automated system, ensuring compliance with CMS Inpatient-Only guidelines was challenging, and the clinical documentation process was overly time-consuming.
Confronted with these challenges and its commitment to delivering exceptional patient care, Griffin Health recognized the need for a comprehensive solution. This realization led them to partner with Medtel for the implementation of SurgiScript, a platform designed to overhaul their care coordination system and introduce standardized, efficient practices across all their facilities.
Implementation and Impact:
Medtel collaborated closely with Griffin Health to streamline their surgical coordination processes, ensuring a smoother flow of accurate information and establishing standardized procedures across all offices. The successful completion of an end-to-end implementation in under 100 days caused minimal disruption to Griffin’s current workflows and IT staff.
The improved workflows now include a uniform and consistent process for all surgical offices. This process initiates with an online booking request that captures the required case information in a standardized format. Precise data capture enables automation of notifications and alerts and funnels the booking request into designated work queues to ensure case readiness on the day of surgery.
“Partnering with Medtel has been incredibly rewarding for Griffin Health. The resulting improvements in our surgical care processes has provided tremendous ROI to our organization.”
Alex Balko
Vice President, Finance and
Chief Financial Officer
Griffin Health has experienced significant improvements in their care coordination processes. 90% of the booking requests they receive are complete upon submission, which has eliminated their reliance on faxes, as well as time-consuming phone calls back and forth between team members to access needed information. Additionally, Griffin Health’s case cancellation rate has improved by over 35%, providing a much better experience for patients and surgeons.
Griffin Health initially had reservations about the new platform’s adoption among surgeons, particularly given the significant volume of surgeries conducted by independent surgeons. However, these concerns were quickly alleviated as the platform gained universal acceptance among independent surgeons, who noted marked improvements in care coordination and reduced workload for their support staff.
Realizing Surgical Excellence: The Griffin Health Success Story
As part of its commitment to enhancing surgical operations and delivering exceptional patient care, Griffin Health integrated Medtel’s surgical care coordination platform, revolutionizing its healthcare operations. The implementation led to notable enhancements, including a high rate of complete booking requests, that streamlined their operations and improved the patient experience.
The partnership between Griffin Health and Medtel serves as a powerful example for other healthcare providers, demonstrating the transformative potential of adopting innovative technological solutions in today’s evolving healthcare landscape.
