Holistic medical systems empower a 'whole body' practice
HealthLinc follows a patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model to serve more than 26,000 patients throughout northern Indiana. Its 65 practitioners provide services that include primary care, dental care, behavioral health care, vision care, pediatrics, and obstetrics. This allows staff to serve the “whole body” and all of its medical needs.
Challenge
In today’s healthcare environment, it’s common for patients to visit one practitioner for primary care needs, another for eye care needs, and another for dental or behavioral health. HealthLinc is committed to a more holistic view — one that, according to CEO Beth Wrobel, gives it “a picture of the whole patient and work to improve their health as a whole.”
Offering multiple critical services under one roof not only gives providers greater insight into a patient’s wellness needs, but also offers much needed convenience.
“We’re supplying those services all under one roof to really work with our patient and reduce the barriers that they might have to get the care they need,” Wrobel said.
As part of its efforts to remove barriers to care, HealthLinc has a mobile practice that treats underserved communities.
“One of our locations is a community mental health center,” Wrobel said. “We take the mobile van there every other Friday. Severely mentally ill patients need that primary care where they’re getting their mental health services, so we’re able to do that.”
In a modern healthcare setting, a multi-faceted practice like HealthLinc faces many challenges.
“As we’ve grown, Greenway has been right there with us… It’s been a great partnership.”
Beth Wrobel, CEO, HealthLinc
HealthLinc would fail in its mission if patient information remained in silos or data wasn’t readily available across clinics. For HealthLinc to succeed, it needed a technology system as holistic and flexible as its caregiving.
Solution
HealthLinc’s relationship with Greenway Health began almost 15 years ago.
“We started when we went from paper to a billing practice management system,” Wrobel recalls, “and it’s been really great, because that relationship has grown. As we’ve grown, Greenway Health has been right there with us, and so we’ve gone through electronic health records, an upgraded billing system and our reporting system, and practice analytics. It’s been a great partnership.”
Beth Wrobel, CEO, HealthLinc
For Chief Operating Officer Melissa Mitchell, Greenway’s flexibility makes it a great fit.
“We use Greenway for everything,” she said. “We use Greenway on our mobile unit. We use it for our medical software, our dental software, our behavioral health software, our analytics piece, our practice portal … We use it for everything.”
Mitchell works with the customization of Greenway products. She built the Intergy practice management system to handle the breadth of HealthLinc’s needs and services.
“We’ve built out optometry and we’ve built out behavioral health. We’ve been able to manipulate the system in a way to capture our grant information for many different grants.”
Greenway even worked with HealthLinc to develop a system that would work with its mobile practice.
“We wanted to make sure we could use the EHR — either for medical or dental — right in the van,” Wrobel said. “Now, our providers feel like they’re in the clinic because the Greenway system is right there for them.”
Key Outcomes
Increased efficiency
Increased flexibility
Reduced no-show rate
Laying the foundation for value-based care
Results
Providers in HealthLinc’s different specialties appreciate the ability to develop templates specific to their needs.
According to HealthLinc’s Dr. Jennifer Maya, “It saves us time with documentation for some of our bread-and-butter visits, like well-child checks, hypertension, or diabetes. You can get the basics of a visit like that, and then it can autopopulate, and then we’re able to easily make any changes for that particular patient visit so we finish our documents faster.”
EHR and practice management data also helps Mitchell maintain an up-to-the-minute understanding of the practice — its financial status, trends in services, and how well it meets paitent needs. Regardless of specialty, she’s able to see all data in the same format.
“It doesn’t take weeks and months so that the data becomes irrelevant," she said. "We get the information quickly from the system, and then we can process it in real time so that we understand what business decisions need to be made right away.”
Like most practices, HealthLinc is also looking to accommodate value-based reimbursement models. As it considers new funding streams, Greenway systems already provide the foundation.
“We don’t have to start with, ‘How are we going to do it?’” Wrobel said. “With Greenway, it’s there, and that’s going to be a huge push to help us get funding.”
HealthLinc has also advanced patient engagement and empowerment by adopting the Greenway Patient Portal. Not only do staff have patient information at their fingertips, the patients have it, as well. Through the portal, patients can schedule appointments, view their health records, or ask questions of their doctors. A new texting function has been added, and the practice's no-show rate has declined with the use of automatic appointment reminders.
“Recently, we saw a 25% clinic no-show rate drop to about 20%,” Wrobel said, “and I was just talking to that site manager who said that it’s been very consistent since we installed the texting and the communications through the Greenway system.”
Most importantly, Wrobel feels that HealthLinc has a stable partner in Greenway, a partner that’s continually evolving to help meet new healthcare challenges.
“I go to a lot of national conferences,” she said, “and I hear stories from other federally qualified health centers, and they’re on their second or third EHR — and that’s really expensive. I just can’t imagine having to do that and not having a partner like Greenway Health.”
