The math just wasn’t working out in our favor: 4,000-plus patients requiring an office visit and device check every 90 days meant more than 360,000 reviews of 6-10 pages of cardiac data and alerts. On average, I and the two other physicians in our practice each spent five hours every week assessing and approving these device reports. The entire process carried out by our own administrative and care teams – along with thousands of other hospitals and clinics – looks something like this:

1. Contact the specific device company representative for access to all device interrogations, including any actionable or emergent alerts
2. Download the cardiac data from the device company’s secure server

3. Print the data
4. Read and review the data
5. Sign off on the data
6. Initiate any follow-up appointments or actions based on the data
7. Scan the data into EMR
8. Accurately bill for the time to Medicare and Medicaid

We were constantly navigating four different vendor-specific software platforms – Abbott, BIOTRONIK, Boston Scientific and Medtronic – and sometimes a fifth – iRhythm. This was leading steadily towards burnout, as every facet of our recordkeeping for cardiac patients and their device data became increasingly more tedious and was hindering our ability to provide the best possible care.

Like many clinics prior to the pandemic, we weighed several traditional options for managing everything: hiring additional members to our care and administrative teams, limiting the acceptance of new patients, or even utilizing devices from only one or two manufacturers. But none of those were viable solutions if we wanted to maintain differentiated and quality patient care.

How were we going to move the needle forward?

Unique health IT software became the answer – a digital solution capable of housing a robust data management platform that was scalable and configurable and created more workflow efficiency while offering a variety of integrated and automated features. Three primary processes were needed:

1. Consolidation of all cardiac data from each device manufacturer onto one dashboard
2. Assessment and organization of all data and device interrogations in real-time
3. Compatibility with existing EPM, EMR and billing programs

And to make certain that each of these boxes was checked and adhered to our specific quality standards, our practice took an unconventional approach – we built our own software.

And in 2019, we piloted our platform’s data management infrastructure and capabilities with our 4,000-plus device patient population. During that year, we increased our billing proficiency by nearly 50% and reduced workloads related directly to remote monitoring for our administrative and care teams, on average, by almost 90%.

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