Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Cardiology: Integrates Physician Liaison Activity, Increases Accountability & Eliminates Manual Processes

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Cardiology Practice Overview

The Move from General Tools to Tailored Solutions

Over the years and for many organizations, to this day, Microsoft Excel has been the hammer that could pound all kinds of nails. The problem is that many challenges — especially in nuanced, data-intensive pursuits like healthcare — require tools that can do something other than pound. This is where Children’s Cardiology found itself after implementing Epic.

“We had been using an EHR that was about as old as an Excel spreadsheet,” explains Katina Hunter, who manages marketing, communications, and physician outreach for Children’s Cardiology. “Our liaisons were all using the same massive Excel file in SharePoint, which has limitations that I’m sure are familiar to many people. I could change information, and then another liaison could change information, so it was not ideal from a documentation control perspective. There was just a lot of manual work, so it was relatively easy for everyone to make mistakes.” 

For Children’s Cardiology, the introduction of Epic represented the opportunity to adopt solutions like Marketware’s Physician Relationship Manager (PRM) that both prevent mistakes and interact with the EHR platform in more meaningful, data-intensive ways. The hallmarks of this new era include advanced data analytics, greater reward and accountability, and integration on a level that seemed impossible when Excel was the primary tool.

“Marketware’s the beginning of us making a huge transition,” said Hunter, “to more accountability and true integration.”

Proven Accountability, Improved Team Coherence

Before the implementation of Marketware’s PRM, the physician liaisons at Children’s Cardiology had the burden of both doing their jobs and creating illustrative ways to measure effort and success. The PRM took over most if not all of those latter responsibilities and simplified the effort required to present exactly what the team was doing and why it mattered.

“Now when I send out this report monthly, they can see everything we’ve done, a whole recap of the topics discussed, and how many referrals we received and referrals that we may be concerned with, it makes a huge difference to the physicians now… it’s a completely different conversation that’s happening with the physicians now,” Hunter explained. “They rely on us to be able to provide that data. Now we’re the experts they need in terms of reporting, numbers, and tracking information. So, it’s a big difference in how they feel about the team as well.”

Marketware‘s PRM has also made a tremendous difference in how the physician liaison team feels about their individual tasks and responsibilities. Increased clarity enabled by granular data makes priorities clear and gives physician liaisons a much clearer picture of how their efforts contribute to an overall goal and where they can put in extra effort to increase the likelihood of success.

“I can tell you what the physician liaisons love about Marketware is doing their reporting,” Hunter says. “Actually, I was doing a review this morning and an employee said, ‘I can’t wait now to go in there, now that we’ve done all these webinars, to see the changes to the referral numbers. I can go to Marketware and see that for myself. We don’t have to wait.”

The clarity of purpose and effort provided by Marketware’s PRM drives up enthusiasm and commitment for every member of the physician liaison team.

Ensuring Success with PRM Platform Training 

Marketware’s PRM does more than just categorize and list tasks for the day. It also includes a routing feature that shows liaisons what their day will look like geographically. Sure, MapQuest and Google Maps are great for getting from A to B, but Marketware’s PRM routing feature incorporates prospect data into a synchronized, coordinated plan of action.

Valuable functions like the routing feature and other useful tools are familiar to users because Marketware provides robust training and effective communication.

“Our client executive started coming in person and doing training, and working with the data,” Hunter said. “He would come every couple of months, and that’s when we brought in our data analyst to accompany us in these meetings. That’s when we started using the platform to its full potential.”

So many health IT solutions and platform functions go unused because the vendor fails to provide adequate training. Marketware makes every effort to ensure all tools provide as much client support as possible.