Start Simple: How CODE Prepares You for Integration

What is Integration?

We collect patient-reported outcomes as a service and handle almost everything within our internal systems, so we don’t require much from your end at all–especially in the beginning. One part of the service CODE offers is working with your IT team and/or EHR vendor through that familiar process we call “integrating”.

Integration can be a pretty loaded term. One of the ways we most commonly integrate is by receiving Surgical Scheduling and Patient Admin / Registration messages directly from the EHR. Every time an appointment is created or modified or when patient details are updated, we get a message. For this blog, integration refers specifically to transmitting enrollment data to CODE.

Let’s start with getting started

CODE wants you to start collecting data as soon as possible, and, for enrollment purposes, integration can be a much more powerful tool to start with than is necessary.

We really only need a few pieces of information to get started enrolling patients and collecting outcomes:

1. standard patient identity information
2. patient contact details
3. the operating surgeon
4. a date and description for the procedure

Most of the time, there is a simple solution already in place that can be used to extract a concise report from the PM/EHR and/or surgery scheduling system.

How does a simple report help?

Some of our customers have seen completed assessments within days of their first kick-off call by starting with a super simple enrollment process. You can create a structured data extract with the required elements, drag-and-drop it on our secure upload page, and likely have completed pre-op surveys waiting for you in the morning! Alternatively, we’ve seen situations where months have passed, thousands of the customer’s dollars have been spent, and still no PROs have been collected as we wait for an integration to finish.

Your outcome program gets better as we get to know each other better

When patients have been enrolled and you’ve started collecting outcome data, we can better understand your system and workflow. What’s your typical surgical volume? How far out are most surgeries scheduled? What does a Cancel or Reschedule look like? This is all valuable information in making sure you capture as many eligible patients as possible in a way that is most convenient for your patients! Then, once we’ve seen your process (and you’ve seen ours) we can discuss the best options for an enrollment integration.

We’re always perfecting the process

It may even be the case that the report you started with is exactly what we need, or only a few tweaks need to be made to fill in some gaps, and then you can keep collecting without having to invest in a time-consuming integration. CODE can even work with your IT team to develop an automatic solution for securely transmitting the data extract. We’re always here to keep perfecting the process and making it more hands-off, so you can keep collecting quietly.

When you’re ready to integrate, we’ll know exactly what to look and ask for to make sure the configurations we build with your EHR align with the outcome program we’ve already been building.