Press Release
04/12/2024
AI-Enhanced Lawyer Referral Service for D.C. Bar
D.C. Bar Partners with Aptaria, Inc. for AI-Enhanced Lawyer Referral Service
All hospitals or clinics that accept funds from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) must meet strict health and safety standards. However, at any given moment, hospital administrators may not know to what degree their organizations are meeting CMS compliance standards.
Why? Because that information is buried in reams of inspection paperwork.
For example, a single hospital might have hundreds of eyewash stations to inspect. To satisfy CMS standards, hospital safety officers need to inspect those stations every week. Staff must fill out a separate paper form for each station and grade them on various compliance standards.
And eyewash stations are just one of hundreds of systems and processes that need to comply with frequently-updated CMS standards.
Ron Bogue, founder and President of eFormix, has spent decades working in health care environments. He recognized a major gap in compliance management technology.
“We work in a world where it isn’t unusual to deploy multimillion-dollar electronic medical record systems,” Bogue explains. “Yet, there was no electronic system designed to give real-time information about whether or not an organization was in compliance with its accreditation standards.”
Hospital compliance had not caught up with 21st-century technology. Bogue knew that digitizing the process would save time, storage space, and stress for health care providers.
The team at eFormix imagined a mobile app to help hospitals and clinics manage compliance. “We had to build a system that was flexible enough to recreate those paper inspection forms and tie in the changing standards,” says Bogue.
After considering several mobile CRM platforms, eFormix settled on Salesforce. The product Bogue planned would need to work without cell service or WiFi. Apps created with Salesforce’s Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK) fill this requirement; they can add data in disconnected mode.
Next, eFormix searched for a certified Salesforce developer who could translate the team’s ideas into a product. They chose Aptaria because of its specialized Salesforce experience and close client collaborations.
To address hospital compliance challenges, Aptaria devised a complete Salesforce solution that integrates two pieces:
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- A mobile app allows staff to fill out digital inspection forms on their portable devices from any location within a hospital or clinic. eFormix Case Study
- A shared, secure cloud database to store the forms, compliance data, and analytics for all the hospitals and clinics that use the app. eFormix Case Study
Since CMS health and safety standards and form templates change frequently, Aptaria gave eFormix the ability to update its digital forms.
The eFormix app provides several tools to hospital administrators for tracking the state of compliance in their organizations. With customized dashboards, clients can check an overview of their inspections or narrow the results to a particular standard, location, or department type.
Salesforce’s analytics, configured by Aptaria, let administrators determine which tasks or inspections are overdue on a weekly, monthly, and daily basis. Reports show the results over a period of time, charting how hospitals are improving their compliance efforts.
Aptaria built eFormix’s app to work on multiple operating systems and to pass the security reviews for 3 major online app stores. Unlike many mobile app developers, Aptaria has years of experience engineering Salesforce apps to meet AppExchange’s tough requirements.
eFormix’s app is available to purchase and download on Apple’s App Store, Google Play, and Salesforce’s AppExchange.
With the eFormix app, hospital staff can perform health and safety inspections in half as much time as before.
“One inspection round for a department would usually take 45 minutes to an hour with paper forms. Now that we’ve digitized that whole process, the same safety inspection would take more like 20 or 25 minutes,” Bogue says. “We’ve eliminated the follow-up transcription and manual workflow.”
Other benefits of the eFormix app include:
- Consistently up-to-date forms: Hospital administrators do not have to monitor CMS inspection standards for changes as they used to. Bogue and his staff provide a service to seamlessly adjust the app’s forms for new regulations.
- Automatic workflow management: If an inspection uncovers a health or safety violation, the database will alert the administrator in charge of fixing or assigning the deficiency.
- Less human error: By moving the information collection process from a paper system to an electronic one, the app reduces the likelihood of error, which was inherent in manual transcription.
- Wireless data storage in disconnected mode: Hospital employees can input information from anywhere—even radiology rooms with lead-filled walls. When staff return to areas with service, their data will automatically synchronize with the cloud database.
- Saved storage space: Whereas shelves of inspection form binders took up space in hospital offices, eFormix doesn’t take up any space at all!
Most importantly, eFormix enables hospital administrators to know at any time whether their organizations are meeting CMS requirements.
When government inspectors visit, they can access all the key information about an institution’s health and safety compliance with just a few clicks. Hospital staff can search the eFormix database to produce the appropriate documentation—instead of sifting through thousands of paper forms.
Like no other product on the market, eFormix is poised not only to improve hospital efficiency, but also to make health care environments safer for patients and staff.
