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What online tool is your business using during the COVID-19 changes?

Acumen Clinic is a private Orthopedic Surgery Clinic alongside Acumen Reconditioning.  Together they take care of patients that require surgery and/or rehabilitation of acute injuries  or ongoing bone, muscle and tendon pain in Alberta and British Columbia.  Our providers travel between the 2 provinces in multiple cities and even more clinics to ensure patients are well served close to their homes.

How do we keep our information organized?

Acumen Health Tech (AHT) is an important part of our business.  We built and continue to refine our own Electronic Medical Record (EMR) to reflect our clinic’s creed: ‘The Patient at the Centre’.  AHT is built to put the patient at the centre of a caring circle, nothing less.

Here is what you need to know about Acumen Health Tech.

1 – What is Acumen Health Tech?

Acumen Health Tech is a lead management tool integrated with an electronic medical record.  It allows the reorganization of information in a useful yet productive way to expedite care for a patient, all while minimizing the processes for our providers and the admin team of Acumen.

No other tool in Canada was allowing us to perform the work we do efficiently.  We took it upon ourselves to develop a platform on Salesforce that encompasses your care in one location with a minimum of paper.  Tasks as crucial as: communicating within our care team, securely messaging external partners, creating a database of vetted rehabilitation providers for our patients, storing important patient information and electronically signing and sending key documents to expedite surgical care for our patients.

2 – Lead Management

The Acumen Team wants to truly understand where patients are coming from, what population really needs our help and for what reason.  We made an important link from our website to Salesforce using Pardot.  It allows the transfer of information instantly into the “lead” section of our platform and relevant information back to our patients.  Our patient care coordinators are notified and can reach out to interested patients within hours rather than weeks.

When first contact is made and a patient is interested in being cared for by the Acumen Team, we send out an electronic consent for the use of cloud base services.  This consent allows our team to email, text, phone patients, use Docusign to electronically sign documents and store their information into AHT.  This is a crucial part of our organization.  We are dedicated to our patients’ privacy and confidentiality and want them to be well informed about our processes.  Patients want the best care possible and we offer fast access to one of our team members.  This platform has allowed amazing results including quick turn around time to send surgical documents to a surgery centre.

3 – Information, Data and Automation

Early on, we heard from patients that medical treatment often overwhelms them with forms and documents duplicating the same information multiple times.  We minimize exhausting steps by pre-populating information into forms from the first form filled out.  Our clinic intake form asks about demographic information and allows patients to tell their injury story and carries that information across all future forms.  Our providers benefit from this feature immensely as the history portion of a patient’s first form, in their own words,  will be pre-populated in a consultation note where the provider can continue on the patient’s description of events.

The reconditioning team has all information from patients in their session files.  When a provider completes their note, a file is automatically generated from the system and input in the patient’s file for reference.  Depending on the diagnosis, one or several treatment files will be created to continue the care of a patient and have proper documentation of each.

Surgical Patients have a customized equipment list for quoting sent out to the surgery centre immediately.  For patients who are able to take control of their own treatment through exercise and rehabilitation, the Reconditioning Team is automatically notified to reach out.  They can provide the patient with a Home Exercise Program created with our extensive exercise database.  Our providers can select a series of exercises and generate a customized program that is stored in the patient file but also shared with the patient.

4 – Communication

From the first phone call, we listen to patients, their personal story and unique situation.  It’s how we are able to care for the whole person, not just a torn tendon or damaged ligament.  The communication with our patients is often done on the phone, by text and/or email.  All these methods are easily tracked and saved within AHT.

Clear communication within our team is imperative.  We utilize  a “chatting” tool within the system that allows us to quickly and securely send a message or tag someone for an important task to be done.  Our goal is to never let anything slip through the cracks.

Other providers outside of our organization but within a patient’s circle of care are attached to a patient’s file.  This includes family physicians, physiotherapists, personal trainers and other healthcare professionals.  All communication with those contacts is also performed within our Acumen Health Tech file ensuring there are no gaps in supplying providers with necessary information.  Selecting a contact within a file instead of free typing an email limits the chance of error.

5 – Flexibility

The changes within AHT is continuous.  We engage with our patients, understand their needs and listen to their wishes.  We want to ensure the most efficient, yet careful, way to care for patients in need whether it is for a surgery involving our partners CSS and OHSC and/or having our Athletic Therapist and Reconditioning Team care for patients after an injury or surgery.

Without AHT, the steps taken during a patient’s journey would be much more demanding, delayed and at risk of detrimental mistakes.  We are constantly evaluating our patients’ experience and evolving and improving our platform to make the experience better.

We are very lucky to have knowledge and be able to utilize the AHT system in times like this (covid19).  The worldwide pandemic demanded our business to go completely virtual.  Within a day we made a quick transition, updated our consent forms, were able to touch base with our patients and the sports medicine community as a whole.  AHT allows us to accomplish this remotely which means that there are no gaps of communications with our patients, who we put first.  We are so proud, that in tough moments, we are still able to offer the best care by utilizing such an efficient EMR.