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Aculab and eClinicalWorks – Building bridges to better healthcare

The challenge

Healthcare is moving towards a new paradigm. Hospitals are being encouraged to reduce the need for prolonged hospitalisation. For general practices and surgeries, the focus is on improving efficiency and reducing missed appointments – did not attends (DNAs). Securing a reduction in real estate costs and developing a more sustainable system, which overall results in an improved quality of life for everyone, are key goals. Technology is being used in ever increasing ways across many disciplines, such as diagnosis, care, assistance, test results, rehabilitation, and for patient management and information systems.

In that context, many companies are seeking to provide a new generation of information systems to support home-based patient care and clinical practitioners.

In the electronic health records (EHR) sector, companies are looking for mobile and flexible solutions in the areas of patient management, and for advisory, messaging and information systems. Those solutions need to be equally effective, both in hospital wards and in the hands of practice managers and professionals delivering healthcare.

The effectiveness of prevention, prognosis and palliative care across a wide spectrum can be enhanced through the use of technology. Better planning of invitations and requests for care, greater efficiency in the management of appointments, reductions in DNAs, improvements in communication – the sharing of information – with individual patients; all of these targeted areas can be positively impacted through the deployment of telecommunications solutions.

eClinical diagram

eClinicalWorks, messaging in the EHR sector

eClinicalWorks are the largest provider of integrated EHR solutions in the US and support an established customer base of physicians and medical professionals across a wide geography.

As many practices have gone paperless i.e., moved to a system of EHR – the next generation in healthcare IT – eClinicalWorks wanted to enhance its industry leading, cloud-based platform, by offering messenger services, integrated with its comprehensive EHR solution, and available to its entire user community, from within its standard product interface.

Using Aculab, eClinicalWorks was able to:

  • Offer hosted messaging services to ambulatory groups, including large hospitals, provider practices, and correctional health services – enhancing physician-patient communication

  • Use VoIP and text-to-speech technology to send customised or personalised voice messages, SMS texts and faxes, for appointment reminders, schedule changes, lab results, health alerts, etc.

  • Enable efficiency improvements and enhanced patient care through e.g., self-service appointment confirmations (DTMF/speech-recognition) and the simultaneous transmission of multiple broadcast messages, regardless of end-point technology – SIP, PSTN or mobile

The benefits are clear

The comprehensive range of features inherent in the telephony resources accessible through the platform and its high-level APIs enabled eClinicalWorks to quickly develop and integrate an innovative, patient focused EHR messenger option, eClinicalMessenger, hosted on behalf of its practice customers nationwide.

“The benefits are clear, by using Aculab’s communications-platform-as-a-service, compliant solutions can be rapidly developed, tested and deployed. The platform makes it easy to create on-demand telephony applications, without the need for specialist skills and equipment.” David Samuel, CEO and Managing Director, Aculab.

“We were looking for a messaging platform that could handle the volume and short call set-up times we needed, and we found the ideal solution from Aculab.” eClinicalWorks

About eClinicalWorks

eClinicalWorks® is a privately-held leader in ambulatory healthcare IT solutions. With physicians across all 50 states using its solutions, customers include ACOs, physician practices, out-patient departments of hospitals, health centers, departments of health and convenient care clinics. Thirteen eClinicalWorks customers have received the prestigious HIMSS Davies Awards during the past eight years, honoring excellence in electronic health record implementation. The company is second largest in the country for e-prescribing. Based in Westborough, Mass., eClinicalWorks has additional offices in Austin, New York City, Chicago, California and Georgia.