Top 3 Must-Have Features of a Digital Pre-Op Assessment Solution

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Adopting digital solutions is becoming more and more important for streamlining processes and improving patient care, especially for preoperative assessments (POA). To address the challenges of increasing patient complexity and backlog issues, effective digital solutions are essential.

To gain insights into successful POA solutions, we interviewed Dorota Naumiuk, Chief Operations Officer at Open Medical. With a background as an orthopaedic practitioner and extensive expertise in digital transformation consultancy, Dorota provided valuable insights and highlighted three critical functionalities for a successful POA digital solution.

1. Adaptation

What use is procuring the best digital solution out there if clinical staff are not actually engaging with it? If it doesn’t fit within their way of working, it’s difficult to adopt the solution. And so, Dorota emphasised the importance of tailoring solutions to match the workflows of an organisation.

When a solution is customised to local needs and workflows, it becomes more efficient in supporting healthcare providers. Dorota explained that for example, Open Medical's PathpointⓇ ePOA solution has custom worklists, filters, and tags. This significantly enhances efficiency, as providers can prioritise tasks in a manner that is most effective for their specific context, ultimately improving their overall productivity.

By adapting the system to unique needs, it ensures a smooth transition and adoption process for effective performance.

2. Digital screening questionnaires

With a rise in patient complexity comes a heightened need for preoperative optimisation, empowering the patients to take charge of their own health and indirectly support the clinicians in delivering better care. Dorota highlighted the importance of early patient screening and the crucial role of automation in supporting this process.

For example, ePOA automatically sends screening questionnaires to patients via SMS or email. But the true innovation of ePOA lies in its utilisation of locally-based screening tools to calculate a complexity score based on the patient's responses. Its modular architecture allows for automated risk stratification adapted to the local healthcare system.

So it adapts to their system, but it also engages patients early in their healthcare journey. This allows caregivers to understand the complexity of each case early, prepare accordingly, and place them on the most optimal care pathway for their needs.

3. Integration

You can have 10 of the best digital solutions, but if none of them talk to each other, they will create fragmentation and increase burden rather than support quality of care. It can lead to wasted time switching between different platforms or logging in multiple times, increasing the likelihood for frustration and the risk of reverting to traditional paper notes, which defeats the very purpose of transitioning to digital solutions.

With that, Dorota's final piece of advice is integration. ePOA, she illustrated, integrates with existing hospital systems, pulling the essential information for POA from the hospital's Patient Administration System to produce a mini waiting list. But not only does it receive data from other systems, it also sends data back. And it goes a step further by incorporating contextual links that bring clinicians straight to a patient's documentation system, eliminating the need to log in multiple times.

It does come with its challenges. With a lot of legacy systems still in use in healthcare, integration can be difficult. So early identification of priorities and engaging local expertise is crucial for success.

Amidst the challenges in preoperative assessments, it’s clear that solutions must boost efficiency and enable early identification of complex patients. So if you are looking for a solution to truly optimise your preoperative workflow, look for these three features. With them, your clinical staff can be empowered to focus on what really matters - caring for their patients.