PointClickCare Makes Surprise Carequality Announcement

At PointClickCare’s annual user conference #PCCSummit19, the company announced it had forged a partnership with Carequality. Then to the surprise and delight of the hundreds of customers in the audience, the company committed to providing the Carequality functionality free of charge.

“Over the past several months we have been working to leverage and integrate the Carequality network into our platform,” announced BJ Boyle, Vice President and GM of Post-Acute Insights at PointClickCare. “Our customers can now pull CCD data from a partner hospital’s EHR right at the moment of patient transfer via our integration with Carequality. Once verified, that CCD information will populate the corresponding PointClickCare record. Everything is seamless to the end-user.”

PointClickCare represents the largest long-term and post-acute care (LTPAC) network in North America, supporting over 60 percent of all skilled nursing facilities and over 10,000 senior living and assisted living communities. Over 1.4 million residents are managed every day on its platform. The company is therefore uniquely positioned to make meaningful progress on achieving interoperability between acute-care organizations and their post-acute partners.

Addressing the lack of interoperability between LTPAC and acute-care organizations is a key focus for PointClickCare. At last year’s SUMMIT, Dave Wessinger, President and Co-Founder at PointClickCare, boldly announced that the company was dedicating itself to making patient transitions with LTPAC as smooth, seamless and safe as possible. He cited a famous 2003 study as inspiration for this focus.

That study found almost 20% of patients experience an adverse event within 3 weeks of discharge, and nearly three quarters of those events were preventable. Adverse drug reactions were the leading cause of those events. One of the contributing factors to the high number of adverse drug reactions is the lack of medication reconciliation at discharge.

This means that patients are discharged into the care of loved ones or post-acute organizations without an up to date list of medications. Patients are either missing critical medications or have medications that are contraindicated already in their possession. For Wessinger and PointClickCare, this was an unacceptable situation.

“The partnership we announced today with Carequality is a key step in our commitment to making patient transitions safer,” explained Wessinger in a sit-down meeting with Healthcare IT Today at #PCCSummit19. “Last year, we removed the technology challenge with our early Harmony product. This year we removed the operational challenges by fully integrating the technology into the daily workflow. When we saw the value that Carequality could bring to our customers, we decided to remove cost as a potential challenge. So we are making this functionality part of our base subscription. It’s just the right thing to do.”

The Carequality integration will be generally available to PointClickCare customers in mid-2020.

When it rolls out, the large ecosystem of post-acute organizations that are on the single PointClickCare cloud platform, will suddenly be able and willing to share patient data electronically through Carequality. Wessinger and Boyle both emphatically state that the company will be ready to collaborate with any organization that wants to make care coordination smoother and care transitions safer.

About the author

Colin Hung

Colin Hung is the co-founder of the #hcldr (healthcare leadership) tweetchat one of the most popular and active healthcare social media communities on Twitter. Colin speaks, tweets and blogs regularly about healthcare, technology, marketing and leadership. He is currently an independent marketing consultant working with leading healthIT companies. Colin is a member of #TheWalkingGallery. His Twitter handle is: @Colin_Hung.

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