Orthopedic and Fracture Specialists Success Story - Implements OBERDs Intake Solution

Orthopedic + Fracture Specialists (O+FS) is a leading orthopedic practice in the Portland Metro Area, offering immediate diagnostics and treatment within one facility. O+FS believes when it comes to treating patients, there is no “one size-fits all.” With a team approach, both physicians and therapists collaborate to provide each patient with specialized care.

Issue/Opportunity:

Orthopedic + Fracture Specialists (O+FS) dedicated significant staff time and capacity to a labor-intensive patient intake process, limiting throughput.

OBERD Solution:

Switching to OBERD’s clinical intake solution allows O+FS to maximize clinic throughput and improve patient flow despite limited clinic capacity, as well as optimize efficiency for staff members with a digitized process.

In addition, O+FS adopted a Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs) solution enriched by the data set captured via the clinical intake solution. Practice leadership remarked that results from the new technology exceeded expectations.

Results:

In a recent interview, O+FS' CEO Sheila Kisor, explains, “[Now], our schedulers can answer phones faster because they’re not fussing around with a clunky portal, our receptionists can check people in faster because they have everything they need in front of them, and our research staff is not having to manually prep schedules.” Furthermore, OBERD’s intake solution decreases patient wait time. Now patients have the ability to fill out paperwork at home on their laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. During Covid-19, the ability to fill out forms remotely has been a crucial element in maintaining throughput. Kisor stated that staff and patients have less exposure [to Covid-19] due to patients spending less time at their facility. With a faster, more efficient procedure, the company not only saves time for staff and patients, but also keeps everyone safe.

"You can’t just TALK about your quality; you have to PROVE it. That’s the future.” - Sheila Kisor, Orthopedic + Fracture Specialists

With a global shift towards value-based care, there is an increasing need for providers and practices to prove quality. Technology is at the forefront of patient engagement and data capture, enabling practices of all sizes, and with varying resources, to capture data for quality improvement. In fact, when implementing OBERD’s intake solution, Kisor indicated that, “only 2% of senior patients struggled with navigating an iPad.” In addition, there is a high completion rate for questionnaires. In fact, when patients start filling out forms at home, they are 96% more likely to finish them. OBERD’s platform has helped O+FS focus on the future of healthcare by providing a tool that gathers insights for adopting a value-based care approach.

Other benefits of OBERD’s intake solution include providing a platform that is essential for capturing a significant amount of data, easily filtering patient’s outcome data, and has a variety of customizable options. Combined with PROs, intakes become notably more beneficial by collecting additional information such as smoking status, depression, diabetes, blood pressure, and co-morbidity data. The more data you have, the easier it is to identify predictors that can lead to better health outcomes. Furthermore, this system allows one to filter patients by their outcomes data. For instance, filtering KOOS JR scores for all knee replacements based on tobacco use or by patients who have high blood pressure. This tool helps benchmark similar patients, thus understanding how an individual is doing relative to others. Lastly, you have the ability to fully customize your clinical intake data collection with summary views of responses, automated clinic note generation, custom eConsenting with patients’ signature, and appointment reminders. To fully optimize these benefits, a practice can even have them embedded into their EMR.

Kisor mentioned numerous times throughout the interview how important this platform has become for her practice. The digital intake solution enabled O+FS to increase productivity, safety, and quality of care. Equally important, she demonstrated how crucial having control over your own data is – “if you look at Twin Cities [Orthopedics] as a consumer, you don’t have to just rely on what you hear, you can say here’s the data that validates I should go there. I think that’s where the value is.” As seen with Twin Cities Orthopedics (Minneapolis, MN), data helps to validate a practice’s quality. Patients no longer simply hear that a doctor or hospital has high quality care; they can see it through the data. As a result, OBERD’s technology has helped O+FS to further progress towards evidence-based care and demonstrate value.

Key Takeaways:

OBERD’s platform has transformed O+FS’ intake process from a labor-intensive practice to a simple evidence-based system due to the following benefits:

• Decrease patient wait time while increasing patient satisfaction
• Maximize clinic throughput and improve patient volume
• Collect additional health predictors data
• Filter patients by outcomes data to benchmark against similar cases
• Choose from a library of customizable options
• Automatically enroll patients into specific PRO collection protocols and send the data back to your EMR