Valley Patient Care

How We Helped Valley Patient Care

This is a discussion of how InfoPoint uses modules it has created, worked with Valley Patient Care (VPC) to understand its needs and put together a system that was intuitive, did exactly what was needed and saved VPC and its customers time and money.

The Current Situation

Valley Patient Care provides supplies for home health care agencies. Home health care agencies are organizations that provide home based medical care. This is one of the fastest growing areas of medicine because people recover faster and less expensively at home. In home based care nurses go to the patient's house to provide medical services.

Many agencies are going for what is called a "stockless system," which means they do not have the medical supplies (the stock or inventory) at their offices, but buy them as needed. They contract an outside agency to provide the medical supplies. That way they can buy as few or as many items as they wish. They do not have to buy items they may not use, they do not have to deal with multiple vendors for purchasing, nor do they have to store and keep track of the supplies. This is like a "just-in-time" system used to create huge savings in manufacturing.

InfoPoint was approached by VPC, a company that provides medical supplies for home health care agencies and delivers the supplies either to the office or to the customer site. Generally, the nurses order directly from VPC and VPC either delivers the order directly to the patient or to the facility for the home care agency where the nurse gets the supplies and take them to the patient.

The drawing shows two home care agencies, one where the supplies are
sent to a central office and taken to the patient's and another where
the supplies are delivered directly to the patient's home.

Because the patient, the nurse, the supplier and the home health care organization are all in different places the information is often not coordinated. One error that could occur is that the nurse might not report the purchase to the home health care agency office, resulting in the office not knowing the purchase has been made until receiving a bill.

Nurse accidentally skips step 4, or steps 4 and 5 are different

When a problem like this happens, to sort it out might involve the nurse, the home health care administration and Valley Patient Care. With the thin margins in health care services, having three people involved in unproductive work can really hurt. In any business, errors take directly away from profits. In competitive businesses, this could mean the difference between success and failure.

There are other sources of errors and hidden expenses in this system. Some other errors:

1. Two nurses could order the same supplies for the same patient. That might involve 4 people to straighten out.
2. Delays in knowing how much was spent on each patient could lead to exceeding the spending caps.
3. When different agencies and different nurses within the agencies need or use different products, a special form needs to be created for each type of nurse in each agency. Forms must be printed, distributed and reprinted if changed.
4. There is no auditing of the time of purchases and delivery.

The Solution

InfoPoint and VPC put their heads together and came up with a system that would greatly reduce or eliminate these errors.

In this new system, a centralized database of all transactions is kept at InfoPoint. Since the system is Web based, it can be accessed by any person with access permission. Anyone with the proper password can access the information from anywhere over a secure, encrypted link. VPC can create new agencies, and each agency can add patients or nurses to the database. Whenever a nurse orders supplies, the order is saved to a running charge for the patient. It is marked with the current time, the cost, the nurse who ordered the supplies and all other relevant information. The order is then received by VPC and filled. The nurse visits the patient and then verifies the delivery. The home health care agency can view or download the transaction at any time (converted data to customer format). The data is converted to a format that the home health care agency uses so they can manipulated it and save it. If the nurse wants to check up on orders for patients, the information about past orders is available any time.

The agency controls access to the inventory. They can easily create the appropriate types of forms that a nurse can access for the supplies he or she will need. When the nurse logs into the system, it knows what type of care provider he or she is. Then the supplies and the forms that are appropriate for the nurse are all that the nurse can view. People not affiliated with the organization cannot get access at all.

Another benefit of this system is that the costs can be managed on a per-patient basis.

Each patient has a maximum amount that is expected to be spent based on the diagnosis for his or her condition. The diagnostic code is called an HHRG code. If more is spent on the patient than is expected then the nurse, the agency and VPC are all notified.

InfoPoint modules and expertise solve the problem

Now the agencies, VPC or the nurses can see exactly what was ordered for each patient the instant it is ordered.

Not duplicating work reduces errors and cost

In PC based systems, as opposed to inventory access via a Web site, charging the costs to a patient, comparing spending to a cap and so on, there needs to be a person. Multiple users cannot access a PC database at the same time. That means each task has to be done two or more times. A nurse needs to tell the office what he or she ordered. If a nurse needs to know if a supply has been delivered, he or she needs to call the office and someone there needs to look up the information.

With this system VPC, the nurses and the administrators all have access to the exact same information. Instead of relaying the information to someone to enter into the computer, the information is available to anyone with access. Instead of the information being available from a single computer that may be being used for something else, anyone with Web access and proper access codes can have access to the data.

InfoPoint modules and expertise solved the problem

The system to manage the nurses, organizations and patients uses the user management modules that InfoPoint has created. The inventory management system was created by modifying the inventory management system that InfoPoint created for stores. InfoPoint leverages the similarities between businesses, while enhancing the differences. Your business is the best not because you do things the same as everyone else, but because you do them differently. Why would you want to use the exact same software they use. Let InfoPoint sit down with you and talk about how we can build something to fit your business instead of you trying to fit your business to software that does not really do what you need it to.