What You Should Know:
– Intermountain Healthcare collaborates with Vynca, a national leader in advance care planning solutions to prioritize and digitize advance care planning.
– The
collaboration enables integrated digital completion workflows and establishes a
single, centralized source of truth with built-in error prevention – enabling
the Intermountain Healthcare team to honor patients’ end-of-life
wishes, avoid unwanted healthcare utilization and reduce trauma for
families, caregivers and clinicians when faced with hard decisions in a medical
crisis.
Vynca, a national leader
in advance care planning solutions, today announced a partnership with Intermountain Healthcare, a
not-for-profit health system, to ensure advance care planning documents are
easily and reliably accessible to clinicians, patients and their caregivers
across the care continuum. The collaboration
enables integrated digital completion workflows and establishes a single,
centralized source of truth with built-in error prevention – enabling the Intermountain Healthcare team
to honor patients’ end-of-life wishes, avoid unwanted healthcare utilization
and reduce trauma for families, caregivers and clinicians when faced with hard
decisions in a medical crisis.
Why It Matters
Intermountain has
been at the leading edge of healthcare systems
identifying evidence-based innovations to achieve the Triple Aim – improving
experience of care, health of populations and
reducing per capita costs. As such, they recognized that improving
end-of-life care quality and reducing
unwanted healthcare interventions required a
new solution with the digital data capabilities to define and track
success. Intermountain is able to transform the
process of advance care planning by integrating Vynca’s
end-to-end solution with the health system’s existing clinical workflow and
their Cerner electronic
health record (EHR), who is also a Vynca partner. The collaboration enables customized outreach to
patients, shared decision making to digitally complete documents and ensures
documents are available to clinicians, patients and their selected caregivers.
“We are grateful to collaborate with an innovative health system like Intermountain to support providers and patients through the advance care planning process,” said Ryan Van Wert, MD, CEO and co-founder, Vynca. “Vynca’s solutions and services are designed to guide and empower individuals and providers to engage in these important conversations. Through shared decision making and document accessibility, patients can feel confident that their care preferences will be known across the care continuum.”
Integration
with Cerner EHR
A
lack of clarity in patient wishes, combined with concerns over document
accuracy and integrity and breakdowns in transitions of care have
historically led to low clinical confidence in advance care planning documents, as
well as patient safety concerns and unwanted healthcare utilization.
By integrating Vynca’s digital technology solutions
throughout the entire system, Intermountain gains
the ability to increase advance care planning conversations and documentation, access forms at
the point of care, decrease hospital mortality and
readmission rates and improve patient and family care satisfaction.
“Vynca’s software solution provides an effective digital storage and retrieval system for advance care planning documents that integrates into our Cerner EHR,” said Mary Helen Stricklin, MSN, RNC, Intermountain’s system nursing director for palliative care. “Caregivers at various points of care are able to quickly glance to see if a patient has stated preferences for end-of-life care or life-support, so they can know, share and honor those preferences. The Vynca software also allows caregivers to complete electronic Provider Order of Life Sustaining Treatment (POLST) forms stating end-of-life wishes. Vynca provides for these forms to be signed electronically by the patient and provider with an immediate availability in their medical record. If patient wishes change, new documents are easy to create, and previous documents can also be viewed in their record.”
Intermountain receives
business intelligence and reporting information on when, where and if advance care forms were
accessed at the point of care before critical
clinical decisions were made – delivering insights into utilization, success
and value from implementing a digitized advance care planning program. Vynca enables providers and patients to not just view
documents, but also continue discussions across all care settings.
