Forward Advantage and MEDITECH work together to streamline genomics reports for easy access and distribution
Golden Valley Memorial Healthcare (GVHM) is dedicated to providing its patients with the Golden Standard of Care. It provides top-rated providers, personalized care and conveniently located facilities.
To ensure the best care, GVMH also relies on Forward Advantage’s Communication Director for efficient and reliable report distribution from its MEDITECH EHR.
As part of its Golden Standard of Care, GVMH is growing its Cancer Center to provide patients with more convenient, local services. Part of this effort includes being the first facility to go live with MEDITECH’s Expanse Genomics module. To complement this solution GVMH also chose to be an early adopter of Forward Advantage’s Genomics SmartRoute, which enables them to share genomic reports with outside providers.
Both MEDITECH and Forward Advantage recognize the growing importance of genomics in the medical community and worked together to address customer needs. The new Expanse Genomics solution allows discrete genetic results and genomic PDF reports to be electronically incorporated into a patient’s medical record for easy access, then a Forward Advantage SmartRoute automatically shares results with outside providers. We were fortunate to have a sit-down with Jean Srch, Clinical Applications Specialist at GVMH, to learn more about GVMH’s specific use case. A big thank you to Jean, as these opportunities provide a valuable learning opportunity for us and our customers.
Golden Valley Memorial insights
with Jean Srch, Clinical Applications Specialist
Q: Describe your relationship with Forward Advantage and experience with our service.
Forward Advantage is always helpful and responds quickly if we have any issues. Its partnership with MEDITECH is also helpful from a service and integration perspective. Our ability to fax PDFs now is wonderful and was a collaborative effort with both Forward Advantage and MEDITECH.
Q: Who are the primary users for Communication Director?
Our Communication Director users are continuously growing. We started with Lab, which uses SmartRoutes for automated faxing, and DesktopFax for electronic desktop faxing. Our Health Information Management (HIM) department does a significant amount of high-volume, large faxes. HIM is one of several departments using DesktopFax and we add users often, including people in the Clinic, Imaging and our Cancer Center. We use Communication Director to deliver approximately 30,000 pages a month.
Q: What are the main challenges that Communication Director addresses, and how does it help meet organizational goals?
I can’t imagine life without Communication Director. The fact that we don’t have to fax by hand and keep a list of everything is a huge time saver. If we didn’t have Communication Director, we’d need one full-time person in the Lab to handle faxes. This efficiency trickles down to financial savings, better patient care with more timely results and improved provider relations.
Q: What are the benefits of having both DesktopFax and SmartRoutes?
Our HIM department receives requests from various companies, vendors, insurance providers and physician offices to fax a patient’s medical record or certain parts of it. DesktopFax is the only way to do this because it is all done after the fact.
Q: What other SmartRoutes are in place in addition to the Genomics SmartRoute?
In addition to Genomics, we have SmartRoutes for Lab, ITS (Imaging), Radiology and Pharmacy. Our Pharmacy SmartRoute works differently from the others in that it provides automated alerts to the offsite pharmacist for new orders or medication changes.
Q: Before MEDITECH’s Genomics module, what was the internal workflow for these types of reports?
It’s an evolving thing, but there are some genetic tests that have discrete results and can be handled via the Lab module, and others come back as a PDF or a mix. Currently, we are only interfaced with Quest, so a discrete result comes back linked to the PDF. This eliminates the need to print and scan, because it gets linked back to the Lab with the order.
Our main workflow challenge was when we didn’t get the discrete data. There are kits from multiple testing companies to collect tissue samples and sometimes blood from the patient, which get mailed off to the testing companies. That was all a paper-driven process, where results were faxed or mailed back to the Cancer Center. That PDF would have to be manually scanned into our system by our HIM department and would not be linked to an order, but would be placed in a folder in our EMR. With these paper-driven companies, we can now place an order and the PDF report will link to that order when it comes back and can now be automatically faxed out with Forward Advantage’s SmartRoute.
Q: What are the key benefits to MEDITECH’s Genomics module?
The main benefit is the ability to provide a PDF that’s linked to an order. This makes the result much easier to find in the EHR. The other benefit is that genetic testing allows us to flag certain medications using pharmacoeconomics or gene typing. For example, if a patient is on a blood thinner, gene typing can indicate that they may not respond as well to some types of medications. This is done through integration with First Databank.
Q: What challenges does Forward Advantage’s new Genomics SmartRoute solve?
We have patients from other parts of the region who come in with paper orders for genetic testing (mainly blood testing right now). Forward Advantage’s SmartRoute allows us to fax results automatically to these outside providers. Our Cancer Center continues to grow, and this is a huge benefit to our patients, as they no longer have to travel as far for chemotherapy.
Q: Discuss the benefits of predictive analysis and the effect genomics have on patient care.
I think the effect of genomics on patient care will be significant. The fact that we can take care of our patients and process testing, without them having to go into the city, is a huge benefit for our community. Everything is visible immediately in the EHR, which is a huge plus for patient care.
The takeaway
Forward Advantage’s long-standing collaboration with MEDITECH allows us to closely work on solutions to meet evolving customer needs. MEDITECH’s Expanse Genomics solution combined with our new SmartRoute provides a great example of this commitment. Customers like GVMH communicated a need to streamline how PDF genomic reports are displayed in the MEDITECH patient chart, and sent to providers, and our three-way collaboration made this possible. With the new SmartRoute, these reports can be automatically delivered to providers for more efficient care and better patient outcomes – all part of GVMH’s Golden Standard of Care.
Interested in learning more about Communication Director and how it can benefit your organization?
