External Connected Care
In my last blog entry I discussed Internal connected care. To truly have connected care, internal connected care is the enabling technology to facilitate external connected care. External connected care is the ability to share clinical data between disparate providers. It allows a discharge summary to arrive at another provider before the consumer arrives to give the agency the consumer's diagnosis, active medications, reason for referral, demographic data and much more. We call this new product CareConnect, and are using the evolving national standard called a Continuity of Care Document (CCD) transfer information between Avatar, MIS and Insight systems.
Many behavioral health and public health agencies do not have the resources to Develop and maintain interfaces to various RHIOs and other providers. The Netsmart CareConnect system will allow them to make a single connection to CareConnect and have Netsmart manage the interfaces to other providers and RHIOs. Connecting care in this fashion will provide better service to the consumer by reducting potential medication errors and by reducing inpatient admissions by emergency rooms by providing the clinicians with the information they need when they need it.
We are continuing to define and extend the CCD to add behavioral and public health extensions. At Connections a few weeks ago we had some discussions about these extensions. Some preliminary ideas were to add components of a substance abuse assessment, a risk assessment and a suicide assessment. What are your thoughts?
