CASE STUDY
About Bulverde Family Medicine
Bulverde Family Medicine of San Antonio, TX is a growing provider group of MDs, NPs, RNs, and care coordinators, all working together as a team. Bulverde ensures their patients (mostly seniors) are receiving the most optimal and appropriate care as they transition from hospitals to skilled nursing to home health to being independent.
At a glance
Challenges
- Managing a distributed caseload across multiple locations
- Assuring patient needs and risks are carefully monitored
- Challenge transitioning to a larger scale operation
Benefits
- Hucu.ai easily organizes patient communication
- Messages, forms, and patient information can be shared instantly
- All of a patient’s involved providers can easily stay on the same page
- Users can get patient messages “on the go” from any device without mixing with personal messages
Mandi Killian says:
Hucu.ai has cut down on 75% of the time she spends communicating each day
Challenges
Running a growing hospitalist/snfist practice is challenging
Bulverde Family Medicine, Dr. Ethridge and his clinical team quickly realized that coordinating care for their growing number of transitioning patients across multiple organizations is an exponential problem. Especially in post acute care, patient needs require excellent communication within and across teams.
Coordination with many healthcare providers involved in a patient's care is time consuming
The real problem lies in how many different actors play a role in a patient’s overall healthcare experience. In addition to communicating among themselves as a Clinical team, a group such as Bulverde needs to be in contact with every patients’ nurses, family, surgeon, cardiologists, and many other specialists including staff at nursing facilities caring for the patient.
HIPAA compliant communication needs
Working with as many patients as Bulverde does, this communication chain can become too large to manage via traditional communication tools (SMS/text, email, fax, paper, in-person, etc.). In fact, many such tools are not HIPAA compliant, creating compliance risk. At one point, Dr. Ethridge was receiving 70 to 90 texts and 50 to 70 calls a day, including many that were redundant. This flood of communication could be avoided if all the right stakeholders for a given patient were in one place.
Solution
Patient-centered messaging
Hucu.ai offered them the ability to centralize all messages in the context of each patient and then allowing all other providers/staff to join in the patient-centered messaging. This is now resulting in teams’ efficiencies because now instead of sending or making 5 communication attempts with 5 different media, the entire team communicates in a patient centered channel.
More than just texting
Bulverde team can communicate with teams across their own organization as well as the skilled nursing partners they work with. Teams can easily send/receive documents, images, and links while tagging collaborators for immediate notification.
Affordable
Bulverde Medicine had been looking for a better HIPAA compliant solution for some time and was already using one tool that has been very common in the industry. However, the solution had technology challenges and was not working well on the Android platform. Additionally, because it was priced on a per user license basis, it soon became very expensive and limiting. After trying multiple other HIPAA compliant solutions, they had yet to find one that worked as they wanted, and as importantly, fit within their budget. They finally approached Hucu.ai and were delighted with a simple pricing (per patient) structure that allowed them to grow and collaborate with as many partner locations and their staff as possible without always having to worry about user licenses.
Responsive and easy to work with
Bulverde tried other solutions, but found no one as responsive and easy to work with as the Hucu.ai team. Said Raina Ethridge, Practice Manager. “We are so grateful to have an actual working relationship with Hucu.ai and to feel like they truly care about our patients as much as we do.”
Easy to implement
After a brief demo with the Hucu.ai team, they were able to implement the app across their entire team right away. Dr. Ethridge reports “if you are familiar with how to use technology, period, you can figure it out right away. I could use the main features of the app within a few minutes”. No IT support required!
Results
SAVED TIME
Better patient tracking saves so much time communicating that Care Coordinator Mandi Killian can work with significantly more patients. For Dr. Ethridge, tracking patients in Hucu.ai saves time as they are nicely organized by location and priority. Each patient has their own channel with all collaborators in one place.
TEAMS ON THE SAME PAGE
Through Hucu.ai's in app tagging feature, Dr. Ethridge is able to avoid hours of phone tags by just opening a specific patient's channel on the Hucu.ai app and instantly seeing what their condition is and what kind of care has been delivered specifically to them.
ABILITY TO GROW
Overall though, the incredible results that Bulverde has received can be summed up in one quote by Kilian: "There is so much potential for Hucu.ai.I am so excited about it, I even have my own dreams about what it will do for us. It is a game changer in the industry as a whole, something I have never seen before".
