Public Health Cost Savings

IRIS revolutionizes the patient referral process by embedding clinical rules directly into the on-line referral placed by the provider. This has been accomplished without a net increase in the workload on the provider. The real-time interaction between the ordering provider and the clinic rules results in higher quality care and lower costs. Direct examples of how this technology is being used by existing IRIS clients include:

• Physician education regarding best practices for treating the patient’s condition

Providing physicians with immediate treatment recommendations means better care for the patient, lower cost to the safety net, and more capacity at the specialty clinics for patients in need of urgent care.

• Ensure all the proper workup is performed before the encounter
Far to often, patients arrive for a specialty consultation with incomplete or unavailable clinical workup information for a productive consultation. This leads to a wasted appointment, delayed medical care for the patient, and increased cost as the appointment is rescheduled until after the workup is performed. IRIS ensures a productive consultation by clearly delineating the workup requirements and enforces the compliance of the ordering provider. As a result, the cost and lost time associated with this problem are avoided.

• Prioritize the referral based on the patient’s clinical acuity

A classic problem in healthcare is insuring that clinically acute patients are properly prioritized. Today, this is dependant on the ordering provider calling the specialist to get a priority appointment for their patients. In addition to having a significant time impact on both providers, this process yields inconsistent results. IRIS brings standardization to this process. Interaction between the referring provider and the clinical rules allows IRIS to assign the appropriate urgency and route the referral to the appropriate clinic.

• Redirect the referral to the most appropriate service.

Providers interact directly with the clinical rules while making referrals, providing them with immediate feedback. As an ‘intelligent’ referral ordering system, IRIS works with an ordering physician to construct one or more interrelated orders to be scheduled into the client's database. Based on information provided by the referring physician IRIS will engage the appropriate clinical rule and prompt the referring physician with questions regarding the patient's condition. IRIS then assigns the appropriate urgency and routes the referral to the appropriate clinic.

For more details on these and other examples, select RULE EXAMPLES

---