Improved Patient Intake for Elara Caring

Client Overview

Elara Caring, a prominent national provider of home-based care, operates through a complex care-provider referral network. They are tasked with managing multiple inbound data systems and previously relied on a cumbersome, manual bidding system for patient intake.

Challenges

Elara Caring’s legacy system was marred by several inefficiencies:

• Slow and Manual Processes: The manual case referral and bidding process was not only slow but also prone to errors, leading to lost bids and excessive use of human resources.
• Inaccurate Data Handling: Fetching data from various EMR/EHR systems resulted in significant delays and inaccuracies, negatively affecting the overall referral process.
• Cost and Inefficiency: The legacy system was costly to maintain, inefficient, and lacked effective tracking capabilities, making it difficult to manage operations and measure performance.

Project Goals

In partnership with Blue Orange Digital, Elara Caring sought to revolutionize its patient intake system through the following strategic objectives:

• Intake Automation: Streamline the case referral process from inception to completion, ensuring a seamless, automated workflow that minimizes manual intervention.
• Enhanced Monitoring and Reporting: Implement advanced tracking and reporting mechanisms to provide real-time insights into the referral process, enhancing visibility and control over operations.
• Expedited Bidding: Drastically reduce the time needed to prepare and submit bids, accelerating response rates and improving competitive positioning in the market.
• Precision in Profitability Analysis: Refine the accuracy of profitability assessments for each case, enabling more informed financial decisions and optimizing resource allocation.

The Solution

Blue Orange Digital took a comprehensive approach to building a data infrastructure revamp of Elara Caring’s data management and referral system:

1. Real-time Data Pipeline: Developed a real-time data pipeline that improved every stage of referral data processing, including ingestion, extraction, classification, modeling, pricing, and analytics.
2. HIPAA Compliance: Implemented a HIPAA-compliant system, built with HITRUST CSF standards, designed to de-identify personally identifiable information (PII) across all non-production data. This step was crucial for ensuring patient confidentiality while enabling efficient analytics and report development.
3. Advanced Data Processing: Integrated optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP) to ingest and process highly variable data from multiple sources efficiently.
4. Document Classification and Data Extraction: Employed topic modeling and keyword extraction techniques to classify documents accurately and extract critical patient information, thereby enhancing the precision of the data used in the bidding process.

Technologies Used

• Azure: Provided the cloud infrastructure necessary for hosting the data pipeline and ensuring scalability and security.
• Databricks: Used for its powerful data processing capabilities, which were essential for handling complex and voluminous data.
• PowerBI: Utilized for dynamic data visualization and advanced reporting, facilitating better decision-making and tracking.

Impact

The solution implemented by Blue Orange Digital transformed Elara Caring’s patient intake and bidding system by:

• Automating processes, significantly reducing the time and effort required to handle referrals.
• Enhancing data accuracy and reliability, which is critical for increasing the likelihood of winning bids and accurately assessing case profitability.
• Improving operational tracking and reporting, allowing for more informed strategic decisions and better management of resources.

This project not only optimized Elara Caring’s operational efficiencies but also positioned them as a more competitive player in the home-based care industry, leveraging advanced data analytics to improve patient intake processes.