According to the U.S. Surgeon General’s recent Advisory on Building a Thriving Health Workforce, burnout among healthcare providers has reached “crisis levels,” citing research from the National Academy of Medicine finding that 35%-54% of nurses and physicians and 45%-60% of medical students and residents have reported symptoms of burnout. While the factors contributing to this burnout are many, the advisory from Vivek Murthy, MD, MBA, Surgeon General, goes on to highlight the need to reduce administrative burdens and optimize technology as a way to help healthcare workers focus their time on what matters most – their patients.
“All technology companies and industry leaders that intersect with our healthcare system can play a role to improve health worker well-being,” the advisory said, calling on healthcare technology companies to, “design technology to serve the needs of health workers, care teams, and patients across the continuum of care.” Murthy cited the need to strengthen data integration across various platforms and health sectors, with example opportunities including simplifying electronic health records (EHR)-based workflows and enabling automated health data integration across systems to deliver a comprehensive patient view and ensure care coordination across providers.
At Bamboo Health, this is something that we aim for each day. We understand that healthcare chief information officers (CIOs) and chief medical information officers (CMIOs) face unique sets of challenges when implementing technology solutions for their organizations, ranging from the need to facilitate workflow consistency to complying with expanding regulatory requirements and beyond. Variables like these, combined with the COVID-19 pandemic and opioid epidemic, make for an overwhelming scenario. Therefore, we work hard to provide solutions that make accessing data and analytics easy by integrating the data directly in the clinical workflows within the EHR. The result of this system integration saves clinicians time and saves provider organizations money while ultimately enhancing patient care.
Enabling Direct Connection Between PDMPs and EHRs for Improved Clinical Workflow
One example of this in action is our PMP Gateway solution, which provides direct connection between prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) and EHRs for fast access to PDMP data in the clinical workflows. With a user-friendly interface and pre-built connectivity to 500+ EHRs, pharmacy management systems, and health information exchanges (HIEs), along with the support of multiple integration protocols to suit a variety of health IT systems, integration of PMP Gateway is closer to “flipping a switch” and no longer a tiresome, months-long project.
Embedded in the clinical workflow at the point of care, the platform displays real-time controlled substance prescribing data, often disconnected from current EHRs. These types of integrations provide users with a comprehensive view of prescription history, in one place. This eliminates the cumbersome, time-consuming task of multiple sign-ins that often hampers physicians and pharmacists when accessing PDMP data, namely, exiting the EHR to log into the state’s PDMP site to comply with state requirements to search patients’ drug histories before prescribing opioids or other controlled substances.
With PMP Gateway, systems also gain the benefit of a rules-driven data-integration service and platform that supports multiple protocols and multiple states with just one interface – enabling interstate data sharing through PMP InterConnect. This provides a full, longitudinal view of a patient’s multi-state history to help physicians and pharmacists query other states to better manage prescribed substances beyond state lines. And the service is fully supported 24/7/365, with any future changes required by the health system managed by Bamboo Health for all connected states.
By the numbers, PMP Gateway has proven to achieve significant time savings for providers, thus making them more efficient in their daily activities. Highlights include:
- Provides a single point of access to 44 state PDMPs
- More than 102 million transactions processed per month
- Over 132,000 facilities with PMP Gateway integrated access
- Over 1 million practitioners receive PDMP reports within their workflow
- Over 5.2 million hours saved by practitioners every month through improved workflow efficiencies
Enhanced Care Coordination Begins with Real-Time Data at the Point-of-Care
While EHRs have and will continue to play an increasingly important role in the future of healthcare delivery, in order to maximize their clinical utility, we must make it as easy as possible for clinicians to access real-time data and actionable insights at the point-of-care. PMP Gateway’s ability to offer clinicians one-click access to the PDMP directly within the EHR is a great example of Bamboo Health doing just that. For health systems and physician practices, PMP Gateway simplifies integration of controlled substance prescription information into health IT systems. It eliminates the need for healthcare providers to build and sustain individual integrations with each state PDMP by providing a single access point with existing integration into most EHRs – saving clinicians time and enhancing patient care.
Moving forward, Bamboo Health remains committed to serving the best interests of the healthcare workers that we offer solutions to, so that they can most effectively care for their patients. Through our vision of cultivating care collaboration, we strive to give everyone the opportunity to thrive. Whether it be a physician, payer, or state, we help providers across the country work together on a shared platform with the unique data, insights, and clinical decision support tools needed to improve care coordination and enhance their patients’ physical and behavioral health.
For additional information on PMP Gateway:
Read our Ochsner Health Case Study to learn how our one-Click PDMP access and NarxCare Risk Analysis Tool helped reinvent Ochsner’s opioid prescribing.
Read our Norton Health Case Study to learn how Kentucky’s largest healthcare system integrated advanced technology and analytics to address the state’s opioid crisis.
