Tampa General Hospital Speaks on Physician Adoption – Successfully Addressing New Tech Implementation Concerns

 

When implementing new technology solutions for better efficiency, productivity and engagement, physician adoption works well when issues and performance expectations are addressed early on. Jason tells us about the experience of implementing Clearwave Scheduling at Tampa General Hospital (TGH) and bringing PCP practices into the project.

Clearwave CEO Mike Lamb recently interviewed Jason Swoboda, the Associate Director of Emerging Tech and Health Innovation at Tampa General Hospital. Known for their patient-centric, tech forward approach to healthcare, TGH is an award-winning 1,000+ bed teaching hospital that we’re proud to partner with.

 

Video transcript:

Mike Lamb: Let’s flip over to – from the patient side to the physician side. More specifically, how do you see the provider adoption of online scheduling, which is an example that we’re talking about here – one example. How do you see that adoption taking place? I know it’s early days, but do you see any hesitation on a provider end that you’ve experienced?

Jason Swoboda: Adoption’s been great. As a foundational element, we had to allow the PCP offices to allow online scheduling. So the PCP offices have to opt in to be able to – in our EMR, which is Epic – to allow for them to do online scheduling. That was a hurdle that we addressed upfront. PCP practices like the autonomy of being able to do scheduling themselves. And in part, they also want to allow time for urgent care and same-day appointments. Sometimes it could just be a control item of that issue or that scheduling issue. So you have to really address that upfront.

Another issue that was brought up when we approached this project going with the online scheduling was inappropriate visit utilization. So the concern was that, gosh, we’ll have a patient that will take a same-day or a sick visit when it’s a routine visit, or it’s a routine visit when it’s a brand-new patient — we have a new patient slot. Being able to talk and work with the PCPs to understand, hey, these were some of their concerns. And then we had to pick the appropriate provider – excuse me – the partner. When looking at the different solutions that were out there, we took all of those items that we knew were of concern to our PCP offices. And we said, hey, if we can guarantee that these things will happen, what is your, if you will, acceptance to it? And they were open to it. And so we did, we did a lot of due diligence and looking at different providers. Once again, one of the reasons why we went with Odoro and Clearwave was that we were able to be able to steer the patient into the right visit type. The acceptance has been pretty great from the primary care standpoint.