Global Health is excited to announce the official launch of its new LifeCard Patient Portal, now available to all of its Hospital Patient Administration System (PAS) and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) users.
The new portal has been in limited field testing with five early adopters across Global Health’s PAS and EMR clients. Since adopting the new system, hospital clients have seen up to 50% of their pre-administration being completed online within 6 months.
For hospitals, the user-friendly LifeCard Patient Portal helps to improve traditional business practices by adopting an online admission process and is key to advancing the digitisation of workflows from pre-admission to discharge.
Mathew Cherian, Global Health’s CEO stated that “The new LifeCard Patient Portal helps patients prepare in advance of admittance to the hospital. It saves significant time through the pre-admission process and helps identify issues ahead of time that could cause last-minute cancellation.”
“This frees up administration staff to increase productivity in other areas. The portal can be a significant saving for hospitals with medical research reports estimating up to 60%1 of cancelled operations are avoidable.”
Consumers have taken up self-check-in methods in many different industries, hospitals and community clinics are no exception. Health organisations should take advantage of this trend to lift utilisation and improve the overall patient experience.
North Eastern Community Hospital’s (NECH) CEO Scott Williams agreed that it benefits both the hospital and its patients:
“Once a patient has completed an online admission form, all data is saved meaning a return visit to the Hospital would only require the patient to review and update information as opposed to completing a whole new form which is required with a paper-based admission form,” he said.
The hospital estimates that the online pre-admission form saves about 50% in terms of administration time, equating to around 15 minutes per patient. This means NECH has saved around 65 hours per month since January 2017, with last month seeing a time saving of around 80 hours.
Pennant Hills Day Surgery’s administration manager said that LifeCard Patient Portal “has been a real time-saver and therefore a cost saver”. The surgery has seen an average time saving of 47 hours per month since March.
Patient Portal’s login credentials are linked to Global Health’s LifeCard – a personal health record. LifeCard allows consumers to carry their medical information with them, anytime and anywhere. They can share this with clinicians, family members and even personal trainers. Encouraging increased patient engagement is vital to help the challenge of growing chronic health problems that are putting health systems under strain around the world.
References:
1 Schofield, W., Rubin, G.L., Piza, M., Lai, Y.Y., Sindhusake, D., Fearnside, M.R., and Klineberg, P.L. (2005). Cancellation of operations on the day of intended surgery at a major Australian referral hospital. Med J Aust, Jun 20; 182(12), 612-615.