Working with patients that have multiple chronic conditions can be challenging. It may mean that the patient has multiple doctors he or she is regularly dependent on—such as a cardiologist to control high blood pressure and a pulmonologist to treat emphysema in addition to a primary care doctor. In that situation, care team members have to make sure that they work in sync to improve a patient’s health care outcome. Without proper communication, it’s all too easy to have a negative impact on a patient’s healthcare (case in point: over 20% of older adults in the US take a medication that could negatively impact them because of another chronic condition). They also need to make sure the patient is kept informed, too. So what’s a care team to do? Use a HIPAA-Compliant Communications tool that makes sure they can collaborate quickly and easily with everyone on the team and automate important information. Here’s why.

Rapid Collaboration Improves Health Outcomes

For a patient with multiple chronic conditions, it’s critical that all members of the care team are in regular contact—but that can be difficult with care team members on the move. One care team member might not be able to pick up the phone, for example, because they’re with another patient and email and text don’t cut it because they’re not HIPAA-compliant and don’t protect a patient’s information. Good collaboration means that it’s easy for care team members to communicate from different locations without having to worry about patient information being breached. That way, care team members can make sure that any treatment decisions they make for a patient with multiple chronic conditions only improves their health—and doesn’t negatively impact any other aspect of their care.

Automatic Communications Keeps Patients in the Loop

For patients with multiple chronic health care conditions, the amount of information and instructions they are given can often be overwhelming. In conversations with healthcare practitioners, patients tend to focus on information about the diagnosis and quickly forget what they are told about treatment. Automatic communications helps patients by sending them personalized information (while staying HIPAA compliant) that ensures they remember their treatment plan, upcoming appointments and other important information.

Easy Collaboration Makes Billing Easier than Ever

An important part of the care team is handling billing and under PDGM, efficiency is more important than ever. With a communications tool that enables easy collaboration, care team members can send documents that can be sent to the billing system, freeing up time for them to focus on the patient’s care.

Vaporstream is the tool that speeds up collaboration, automates communications and makes it simple to send documents to the right place. Care team members easily and quickly communicate—whether to discuss a care plan, handle administrative tasks, or coordinate with another care team member. VS Concierge lets home healthcare agencies easily send documents, images and files that can automatically be sent to EHR or a billing system, speeding up workflows and freeing up care team members. Learn more about how we can help you provide quality care to patients with chronic conditions here.