Eric Tygenhof, MD, FACS, Urology Team Lead
LinkedIn: Eric Tygenhof, MD, FACS
LinkedIn: ModMed
Nadeem Dhanani, MD, MPH, Medical Director of Urology, ModMed
LinkedIn: Nadeem Dhanani, MD, MPH
Every day, over 11,000 patients age into Medicare, and as a result, the aging population is leading to an increased demand for care. Along with this shift comes a rise of “snowbirds” — a group of patients who relocate to warmer locations during the winter and return to their home states in the spring. But moving locations doesn’t mean these patients will stop seeking care when they need it. This migration reinforces the need for increased data accessibility to ensure patients receive complete care, regardless of where they are each season.
By enabling complete care, secure data sharing can result in improved patient outcomes and more efficient practice operations, delivering an overall better experience for patients, providers, and practice staff. As the population ages, it’s clear that data accessibility is no longer a nice-to-have, but a necessity.
Maintaining Continuity of Care
Snowbirds migrating south for the winter means that they may be receiving medical care in two locations, likely across more than one health system or practice, which can create complexities for providers and the patient if the continuity of care is disrupted. Increased data sharing ensures that providers in a patient’s primary and seasonal locations have the necessary information to make informed treatment decisions for the patient and can seamlessly transition the care to another provider when the patient moves locations.
Medicare patients make up over three million snowbirds, meaning they have a higher utilization of healthcare services and require uninterrupted care regardless of location to ensure their health needs are addressed. In fact, one study found that traveling Medicare patients have higher rates of emergency department (ED) and specialist visits compared to non-migratory groups. This emphasizes the importance of enhanced interoperability, ensuring that both specialty and primary care providers for this population can access complete patient histories when needed.
Interoperability doesn’t just benefit the Medicare population, however. Younger patients may also split their time between two cities. It’s estimated that snowbirds make up about a third of the American population, with a portion of this population being older adults. This means that strong interoperability functionalities will be crucial not just for the growing retiree population in the near future, but for several age groups that currently travel seasonally for lifestyle, work, medical reasons, or otherwise who will have their own set of care needs. The wider migratory population highlights an even stronger need for improved data sharing that enables every patient to receive quality care wherever they are living each season.
EHRs Enabling Undisrupted Care
Interoperable electronic health records (EHRs) are indispensable tools for painting a complete picture of a patient’s health for providers. When fully leveraged, the platform can support clinical teams in ensuring patients receive undisrupted quality care while preventing duplicative efforts and reducing costs for patients and providers. For example, when a urologist sees a patient for the first time, they may not have a full list of the patient’s medications, which can impact treatment decision-making – with an interoperable EHR system, the urologist is able to efficiently import a summary of care from the patient’s other provider.
However, true interoperability can’t be achieved through a piecemeal approach – there needs to be a uniform guide to achieve widespread connectivity. Carequality is one interoperability framework enabling nationwide care coordination. It serves as a valuable tool for the healthcare industry, but specifically for migratory patient populations. This functionality in an EHR enables providers to digest information from both inside and outside the clinic to ensure patient care is undisrupted.
Interoperability is one essential feature of an EHR for delivering continued care, but other features play a vital role in patient care across different providers. For example, a patient timeline functionality enables patient care updates over time to be easily digestible for care teams. This valuable feature within an EHR analyzes patient visits across all care venues to offer providers a complete view of the patient’s medical history on a single screen.
By having a repository of patient information, practices can be brought up to speed quicker, work more efficiently, and improve visit documentation. For patients pursuing care in more than one city, this EHR functionality significantly contributes to better enabling the complete care of patients.
AI That Supports Data Sharing
Interoperable EHRs are critical for enabling the continuity of care across practices, but we can’t overlook the other tools that will be just as pivotal – AI solutions. Recently, there has been an explosion of AI tools and conjointly, we’re seeing a rise in solutions that can enable smarter data sharing. For example AI-backed faxing solutions allow practices to ingest information and route it to the right person. By leveraging smarter faxing, practice staff reduce the time spent on categorizing and linking inbound faxes to patient records, including referrals, lab results, imaging and more, enabling practices to reduce time-intensive administration and improve clinical workflows.
In addition to lightening a significant documentation burden on practice staff, AI-enabled tools can also make patient information sharing between practices easier and more efficient, ensuring the continuity of care for snowbird patients and beyond.
Increasing data accessibility and fostering collaboration across providers will be key to providing undisrupted patient care, especially in locations that attract snowbird populations. By leveraging interoperable systems and breaking down information barriers, providers can deliver quality care, while also experiencing improved practice efficiency and cost savings. As the population ages and traveling lifestyles evolve, the ability for healthcare providers to seamlessly access comprehensive patient information will transform patient care, enabling well-informed care decisions regardless of location.