Solving nation-wide disconnect of healthcare supply and demand

Driving a nationwide shift in the healthcare experience

Background

One of today’s biggest consumer complaints about healthcare is wait times. It is well known that patient satisfaction and outcomes improve when wait times are minimal, yet delays have become a normal and frustrating part of the industry.

The advent and implementation of direct and automated booking systems in recent years has alleviated some of the burden, but delays associated with the delivery of the care itself persist. With worldwide populations undeniably aging, and aging populations requiring more healthcare, the problem is not likely to go away and creates an increasingly urgent need for efficiency.

Delays often present in scenarios such as a patient who is referred to a consultant in a reasonable two-week time frame, but upon visiting the consultant is delayed another two weeks for scans or tests. Alternatively, patients may not know they can travel an hour to receive the services they need rather than waiting a lengthy period of time for their chosen specialist. Available resources are thus wasted as waitlists continue to grow.

These tell-tale signs of supply and demand disconnect are the result of process fragmentation, a natural byproduct of a complex industry with many providers and settings of care. The health system process is ultimately limited by clinician professional hours. While process improvement can’t reasonably extend a clinician’s day, it can make sure the hours in the day aren’t wasted by better connecting the silos of information.

Aceso Health offers a distributed health platform. Sorsix Pinga is a solution provided by our partner Sorsix (https://www.sorsix.com/pinga), which enables a new type of healthcare marketplace that prioritizes both patient and clinician time. It makes the availability of nation-wide healthcare resources publicly known and allows clinicians to book their patients for treatment directly online, thus expanding the utilization of resources.

The health operating system works on any scale, big or small. Private health care firms across Australia, New Zealand, USA, Europe and India have utilised Pinga. The system was also implemented to maintain and organize multiple nation-wide public electronic health record systems (eHRS) and outpatient management systems. For countries that have integrated Pinga, like Macedonia and Serbia, the results are astonishing with waiting lists disappearing within 6 months and system’s doubling their capacity. Pinga is undeniably, and very literally, revolutionizing the provision and coordination of care.

Technology

Pinga was born in the cloud, making it easy to use and implement with no required installation or ongoing support. It simplifies use by having only a single store accessed through available API, GDPR compliance by design, and access via any internet browser. The platform is integrated in a single system and delivers end-to-end health process improvements in areas such as list management, patient administration, clinic management, practice management, real time digital referral, e-prescription, billing integration and clinical enterprise scheduling. Pinga can also serve as a nation-wide health information backbone, like it does for Macedonia’s 2.2 million citizens.

Healthcare professionals report overall improvements resulting in increased patient capacity and decreased waiting times. Many factors contribute to these improvements, including:

· Allowing instant direct booking with real-time visibility of supply to demand. GPs, consultants, doctors and staff can refer and book appointments directly via a central hub and spoke model, while giving patients access to priority slots for urgent care.

· Reducing clinician’s time spent on acquiring patient records and history by providing the information centrally and inter-clinically in an eHRS.

· Offering GPs the ability to book prerequisite diagnostic services prior to consultant visits so that patients may arrive with all items complete and avoid an additional appointment.

· Creating an environment for more sophisticated care planning and triage. A clinic with multiple consultants may share an integrated diary of a patient’s day and act as a panel to rearrange orders as appropriate.

· Informing the patient to be seen faster by an alternate consultant in the same specialty and enabling their option.

· Doing all this while the individual clinic or hospital can continue using the systems they are familiar with.

While decreased waiting times and increased efficiency may seem like a paradox, Pinga has simply done the duty of matching healthcare providers with availability to patients in need. Simultaneously, the platform reduces superfluous data collection and enables the scheduling appointments along intelligent care pathways for those needing multiple healthcare providers. While none of these factors offer an instant solution to the complexities of the healthcare industry, they create a cumulative benefit that has significantly improved operations for communities who’ve implemented the system.

Challenges

Pinga’s intrinsic simplicity and scalability make adaptation for all market sizes possible. The system design inherently understands that not all health systems are the same and is therefore configurable to meet other health system models.

In large scale projects, the complexity associated with onboarding tens of thousands of clinicians has led key decision makers to stagger implementation of Pinga’s features. Each clinic and hospital may operate autonomously according to the processes common to its region and its localized interpretation of their adaptation.

Pinga deals with in-system process models elegantly in a way that aligns with how people work today while delivering a national system that is consistent.

Results

Over ten million patient health records are currently contained on the Pinga platform. The system has over 90,000 users and approximately 200 million occasions of service processed. It is secure by design, protecting and protecting the privacy of patients and data while boasting a 99.99 percent uptime.

In addition to abolishing nation-wide waiting lists for care in a short six month time frame and doubling a country’s system capacity, Pinga reduced wait times for most Macedonian patients who were referred to secondary or tertiary care to within one day. Since integration, specialists, radiologists and hospitals in the country treat twice as many patients with no additional investment. These changes have enabled a ten spot rise in the country’s European Health Consumer Index (EHCI) rankings, from 27th to 16th, only less than a year from system rollout.

Similarly, Serbia has incorporated 7.2 million citizens in its eHRS through Pinga. The country’s integrated healthcare system processes approximately 250,000 appointments and 200,000 prescriptions a day. After implementation, Serbia also rose dramatically in EHCI ratings, from 30th to 24th place.

Future Plans

Pinga evolves with the ongoing addition of system features, like mobile phone portals, real-time reporting, and planning tools. The product will continue to transform healthcare worldwide as new users transition to integrated health systems that help manage and integrate the complexity of a distributed system.

Read more about our modular operating system, Pinga here.