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Appto: Enhancing Patient Coordination

Sumathi Vatsamanu, Co-Founder & COO, Deepti Deepak, Founder & CEO & Deepak Vittal, Co-Founder & CIO , Appto

Enabling better communication and collaboration across the entire continuum of care is imperative to create a value-based healthcare ecosystem. Most healthcare institutions refrain from hiring additional non-medical staff to coordinate responsibilities like patient data entry or appointment scheduling. As an effect, healthcare providers are burdened with fulfilling these tasks, which digresses from their primary goal of providing appropriate patient care. In fact, The Joint Commission (responsible for accreditation of healthcare organizationsin the U.S.) states that roughly 70 percent of accidental deaths and serious injuries in hospitals are linked to communication failures. Aiming to solve these predicaments, Appto has developed an improved care coordination and communication platform. The HIPAA compliant medical practice solution seamlessly connects patients, doctors, and other healthcare providers and converts everyday communications into actionable steps to provide better patient care.

Deepti Deepak, founder and CEO, Appto, says, “Our mission is to improve patient engagement with care providers at reduced time and cost.” Appto offers both doctor and patient-centric applications. By doing so, the company not only minimizes a doctor’s time to update patient information in an electronic medical record (EMR) but also helps patients easily schedule or manage appointments with care providers. Additionally, Appto’s patient-centric application also provides intensive care management tools for users to monitor their own chronic health conditions with ease.

When it comes to patient coordination, Deepti notes that phone calls are the most distinct medium of communication.

However, as staff attend each call personally and update that information in EMR, they end up spending more time per call while other patients wait for their turn. Appto’s cloud phone system with machine learning and intelligent chat-bots integrates these phone conversations with EMR systems, thereby allowing automated information updates. For all non-medical communications, staff can leverage Appto’s customizable, preset responses and save time.

Additionally, Appto also provides a communication portal for healthcare providers that improve the internal communication between nurses and doctors. Some of its unique features are managing appointment and staff scheduling automatically, managing patient discharge from hospitals, sending appointment reminders, analyzing patient communication to improve the patient care, and facilitating after-hour patient calls. The portal can also utilize its mass campaign feature to create custom reminders, updates, and promotions for targeted patients.

Sumathi Vatsamanu, co-founder and COO of Appto recalls how one of her clients started using Appto to enhance the patient coordination system. “The provider served around 80 patients a day, many of them with chronic health issues,” she states. On an average, the care provider was spending about 10 minutes on each patient just to schedule an appointment on the call. This time-consuming process was also causing the provider to miss multiple patient calls. Using Appto, they could automate the appointment scheduling process and thereby drastically reduce the time taken to attend to each request. Also, by sending automated text reminders to patients, the care provider cut down on “patient no-show” by 80 percent.

Another important aspect of Appto is its referral system, allowing seamless transition between different specialties and healthcare centers. Deepti mentions, “Most of the referral systems in the market are not quite user-friendly when it comes to integrating the system with EMR.” Appto’s simple-to-use referral module overcomes these complexities. The application seamlessly integrates with a provider’s existing appointment and patient reminder system to facilitate superior patient-care experiences. Patients can view their referral path, medication, lab results and follow-ups. Using Appto’s patient-centric app called ‘HealthPass’.

Appto envisions creating a highly structured healthcare ecosystem and reduce insurance burden on insurance companies, healthcare providers and patients with the help of its solutions, and in line that, the company is working on improving its platform by leveraging AI and machine learning capabilities. In the future, Deepti asserts, “We want to see Appto as an essential layer above every EMR system to automate the communication channels and provide a seamless healthcare experience.”