COVID-19 has created new and unfamiliar challenges for healthcare providers to deliver patient care. Many non-urgent, but important services like lung cancer screening have been temporarily suspended to protect the health of staff and patients. Healthcare organizations are facing unprecedented challenges in appointment scheduling, patient tracking, and patient and provider follow-up communications to ensure the continuity of care during COVID-19 and once services are able to safely resume.
Advanced healthcare technology solutions are more important than ever now. In a normal healthcare environment, providers are burdened with manual data entry that prevents program growth and early identification and treatment. Patient communications and tracking can be overwhelming, allowing many appointments to go missed and patients to fall through the cracks while healthcare systems lose revenue. Data entry, patient communications, tracking, and follow-up are difficult under regular circumstances. Now factor in a global pandemic where resources have been completely shifted, entire programs are temporarily suspended, and there are mass appointment scheduling changes. Smart technology solutions, like those provided by Thynk Health, can ensure no patient falls through the cracks during this time and lift administrative burdens from essential staff, freeing them to focus on patient care.
During COVID-19 we are providing the following services to support our existing and pending clients at no additional cost:
- Thynk Health Lung Cancer Module will parse all pre-existing EHR data and ACR data to determine patients that may have been affected by the timing of the COVID-19 event and potentially dropped through the cracks.
- You can send letters/faxes/texts directly to patients and/or providers to prompt the re-initiation of orders, when safe for patients to re-schedule.
- Track all rescheduled and missed appointments, to get patients back in as soon as it is possible to resume.
- Thynk Health’s ability to access data through our Epic app connections and through Cerner, eClinical Works, NextGen and other systems, we are able to identify patients who may have had an interval CT chest or PE protocol, for example, that would exclude eligibility for one year, and remind those patients when available.
- Access to the historic database for screening patients, coupled with Thynk Health’s machine learning and natural language processing technology, gives us the ability to potentially de-escalate follow-up timing for those patients who may have tested positive for COVID-19 or are experiencing concurrent fever.
- The above applies to other incidental findings, such as pulmonary nodules that may have been captured during an ER visit, but easily overlooked during this time.
We continue to provide a clear focus on clinical quality, emphasis on removing provider impediments to patient care and returning revenue to organizations. This unwavering focus is why many organizations choose Thynk Health as a partner for lung cancer screening. During this time, we continue to be fully operational and responsive to our client needs. With some of our founding leadership on the frontlines as physicians, we have a unique insight into the current challenges faced by healthcare organizations and providers and will work with you to solve them.
