The way patients are provided with life-saving healthcare is changing. Electronic medical records (EMR) have transformed a caregiver’s ability to create a full picture of a patient’s needs in a way that wasn’t possible in decades past. Simultaneously, there is an ever-increasing need to travel to patients who may be limited by a variety of physical, mental or financial factors.
Today there are opportunities to save time in traveling so more time can be spent where it belongs — with the patient. One way to cut down time is by choosing an Epic geocoding vendor to integrate into your EMR system. With Epic, providers can choose MapQuest for Business to automate the most effective travel routes each day to get to their patients. This translates to real-life, on the ground change.
One case study of Bon Secours Health System found that mobile providers travel millions of miles annually to more than two dozen facilities along the Eastern Seaboard. In 2016, Bon Secours began saving time and money when it integrated MapQuest Directions API into the EMR network, allowing each caregiver to easily sketch out the most time-efficient routes each day to their 14 home care and hospice services. Working with MapQuest allows Bon Secours to spend more time with patients rather than on time-consuming routing.
Bon Secours Application Coordinator Erin Whitehead asserts that the integration of the Directions API into Bon Secours’ EMR system was “seamless.” “MapQuest has been very easy and flexible to work with,” Whitehead said. “Their technology was the only technology we could find to integrate with our EMR system, and the implementation was seamless. Our caregivers really like it because it’s so easy to use.”
