VITAS Healthcare and Centric Consulting Partner to Strengthen Innovative Patient Care Offerings

09/27/2017

MIAMI, Fla. – Centric Consulting’s Miami office (#CentricMIA) is proud to announce its partnership with VITAS Healthcare, the nation’s leading provider of end-of-life care, to advance the delivery of patient care further, using Apple devices such as iPhones and iPads.

VITAS turned to Centric, a business consulting and technology solutions firm, to support the development and implementation of their mobile technology, and enhance VITAS’ patient intake services, clinician workflows, and computerized pharmacy order entry (CPOE). 

“Bringing technology to the hands of clinicians and physicians to enable the process of care reduces the time burden on practitioners and provides real-time data to improve quality and patient safety,” said Karla Schnell, Centric Miami Healthcare Lead.

A cross-functional team of VITAS clinicians and Centric’s mobile technology, clinicians and operational process improvement experts, worked together to design and build an iPad tablet application that allows admissions nurses to seamlessly transition to a faster, streamlined patient intake process.

“As a leader in healthcare innovation, VITAS is focused on continuous improvement for our patient care experience,” said Patrick Hale, Chief Information Officer of VITAS Healthcare. “This mobile solution transfers data in real-time and operates intuitively, so our caregivers minimize the time spent on data entry and maximize the time spent with patients and their families.”

By applying an agile project methodology, the cross-functional team delivered improvements to the app every two weeks. The focus of the collaborative approach was to deliver high priority features with frequent user feedback and rapid quality assurance testing. The approach resulted in the design of new product features that digitize clinical assessment and care coordination forms by using electronic signature functionality for home medical equipment and pharmacy medications.

“By bringing clinicians, technologists and process experts together, we were able to ensure adoption of the app, which solves some important problems, while limiting the impact on already overburdened clinicians and physicians,” Schnell said. “With the continuous demands on the healthcare system, we need to use every opportunity to drive out redundancy and inefficiency while positioning caregivers for the safest practice possible.”