'Social Feed' Keeps Patients Updated on Care

CareLoop system offers both clinicians and patients a social-style method for keeping up to date on care. It works like Facebook for patients, with a real-time social feed that delivers messages from caregivers, questions from patients, test results, explanation of care delivered, etc.

With CareLoop, patients have a live feed giving them everything they need to know about their care and family members can read up and see what’s happening with their loved ones. The system also enables doctors and medical staff to have more touch-points with patients without having to perform another face-to-face visit.

CareLoop is designed to be system-agnostic so it can work with any EHR system. The technology is based on a common code base that allows CareLoop to embed the system into EHRs. The social-like technology can be used by a small family practice or a large health system.

“One of the biggest challenges we see is navigating the health system,” Foster Goss, DO, founder of CareLoop, explains. “CareLoop can really help patients with respect to communicating with their care team. It provides a way for the providers to deliver updates in a very efficient manner. It’s a workflow tool for providers. They can see if the patient read or acknowledged their update."

UCHealth in Denver tested the CareLoop system in its emergency department. Patients were assigned accounts upon arrival in the ER, and caregivers had accounts that allowed them to write on the feeds of any of their patients, or embed test results.

“As an ER physician, I see the patient, I take their history, I put in labs and tests, and maybe go back once or twice to deliver updates," Goss says. "In my busy workflow it’s hard to do one or two touch-points to update that patient, but with CareLoop, including the messages in the system, we could do five to 10 times as many touch-points with patients.”

In a patient survey conducted after the pilot, CareLoop found that 96 percent of patient respondents enjoyed receiving updates from their doctors and nurses, and 90 percent felt doctors and nurses were more responsive to their needs. In addition, 86 percent of respondents believed the CareLoop system improved the communication between providers and patients.

According to Goss, CareLoop plans to interface with Medicare claims data as a means to improve care coordination.  

Source: Healthcare IT News
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