Benefits for Community Health Centers (CHCs)

A HIPAA-compliant patient cross-referral, scheduling and electronic patient information system, our CHConnect solution helps CHCs increase patient utilization of their services and effect operational efficiency through electronic health information. 


Current Problem 

• Patient visits at emergency rooms (ERs) have risen every year. From 1997 to 2002, 97 million ER visits surged to nearly 114 million visits annually, while the number of hospital ERs decreased from 4,270 to 4,037.
  
  
• Nearly half of hospitals have reported that they were at or over capacity. ER waiting times have increased by 33%. About 40% of hospitals reported that they had diverted emergency patients to other presumably less crowded facilities.
  
  
• Ironically, anywhere between 10 and 50% of all ER visits are for non-urgent and avoidable conditions, and the medically underserved are more likely to make such visits.
  
  
• CHCs are a viable means to alleviating the ER problem as they have been able to reduce unnecessary ER visits among all of their patients, not just Medicaid patients, due to improved access to continuous, primary care -- leading to decreased hospitalizations. As a result, communities are able to prevent as many emergencies as possible, treat as many conditions as possible in the CHC primary care facilities, and then use ERs appropriately for emergency cases.
  
  

Our Solution

• Since CHCs are cost-effective healthcare providers and are in the midst of a historic expansion initiative, it makes sense to ensure that their services are fully utilized. Redirecting non-urgent and/or primary care treatable ER visits to them would increase their utilization. By freeing up ER resources, ERs would be able to take on more higher-revenue emergency caseload.
  
  
• Our CHConnect solution is a HIPAA-compliant patient cross-referral, scheduling, and electronic patient information system. It helps to redirect medically underserved patients from a community's ERs to its CHCs for follow-up primary or specialty care -- to result in better continuous primary care for patients, significant savings for ERs and more patients for CHCs.
  
  
• And no changes are required of your existing IT systems.
  
  
• Additional benefits for CHCs include:

• Capturing electronic data for tracking patient encounters, care delivered, outcomes, or unmet medical needs.

• Using such data to support outcomes analysis, population based planning, screening protocols, patient scheduling to improve case management and minimize lost follow-up.

• Being positioned to provide government funding agencies with more and better data.
  
  
• Linking partnering CHCs as well as mobile units into an integrated delivery setting as patients move from one facility to another.
  
  
• Reducing staff time by up to 50% in terms of gathering patient data because it is online.

Contact Us

We will discuss CHConnect with you, understand your community healthcare needs and verify that CHConnect will indeed help your community and that your organization will achieve ROI for using CHConnect. Contact us now.