Improving care, quality of life for autism patients and their families
BluePrint Health IT has been doing amazing work helping many health organizations streamline care coordination for patients and their families. In fact, it won the 2015 Microsoft Health Innovation Award for Patient Engagement for its work with Children’s Specialized Hospital (CSH). In a previous blog by Dr. Christopher Haines, Chief Medical Officer at CSH, you can read about how the Microsoft Dynamics CRM–based Care Navigator from BluePrint is helping CSH create connected communities of care for medically complex pediatric patients and their families. I recently had the chance to catch up with Vikas Khosla, President and CEO of BluePrint, and ask him how CSH will use Care Navigator to improve care coordination and the quality of life for patients with autism and their families.
How is CSH going to expand its use of Care Navigator?
CSH recently announced that it received a grant to advance its treatment of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Children with ASD present unique diagnostic and medical management challenges and require highly coordinated care. That’s where Care Navigator comes in. It empowers the entire care team—including health professionals, patients, and families—to communicate and coordinate in real time with easy-to-use, mobile tools.
CSH will expand services and improve care for children with ASD through the creation and implementation of a care bundle. Designed for the medical home, the care bundle includes an enhanced care coordination program that takes advantage of Care Navigator to streamline communication and workflows and create connected communities of care for children with ASD.
How will Care Navigator help CSH achieve the goals of its ASD program?
Children’s Specialized Hospital seeks to create a best-in-class, evidence-based care coordination model for medical home patients with ASD with the grant. By using Care Navigator, CSH will be able to scale its model of care so it can treat more patients with ASD more efficiently. One of the things CSH hopes to do is to improve access to care by streamlining collaboration and communication among the health professionals involved. That will help determine needed services and improve linkage to services for ASD patients and their families.
Care Navigator will also help with managing an ASD patient’s care by streamlining communication and workflows between health professionals, patients, parents, extended family, and community support systems. This will save time for primary care coordinators and other health professionals, so they can better serve the growing number of children with ASD. And parents will be able to easily coordinate with the patient’s community of care. Family members will also be able to access personalized educational and other resources through the mobile app.
What’s unique about what CSH is doing to improve the experience of children with ASD and their families?
CSH aims to create a model for managing the care of children with ASD that not only improves care coordination, but also improves access to services and the quality of life for patients and their families. They’ll be measuring outcomes such as family satisfaction and parental stress as part of the research initiative. I believe it’s one of the first programs to include those incredibly important outcomes in its research results. The team at CSH hopes that by using Care Navigator as part of this program, families of patients with ASD can focus more on their child and their lives and less on healthcare management complexities. At BluePrint, we couldn’t be more excited about helping CSH innovate to achieve these goals.
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