Georgia Hospital Association to Expand Statewide Care Coordination in Georgia
Wednesday, July 28th, 2021
Audacious Inquiry, a national industry-shaping health IT company, and the Georgia Hospital Association (GHA), a leading advocate for its 160 hospital members, today announced a significant increase in hospitals joining GA Notify.
GA Notify facilitates the secure transmission of actionable, accurate, and event-driven data across healthcare entities, helping hospitals and providers across the state deliver better health care for all Georgians and comply with key federal and state data mandates. The number of hospitals participating in GA Notify has tripled over the past six months, due in part to CMS' new Conditions of Participation e-notification requirement and deeper rural-urban hospital connectivity.
With a majority of the rural hospitals in the state participating, GA Notify is able to bring wide-reaching communities together to simplify healthcare complexities and break down siloes commonly faced by urban and rural hospitals when treating their patients.
When a patient from a rural hospital is transferred to an urban hospital, GA Notify provides a complete patient profile with encounter history across the network—regardless of the geographic distance between hospitals or the potential transient nature of patients. This empowers clinicians with important insights into the patient's overall health for more informed treatment decisions, and providers can better assist discharged patients in getting appropriate care, post discharge.
"Our vision has always been to offer additional data services that require more real-time access to information," said Chuck Adams, executive vice president of the Georgia Hospital Association. "We are particularly excited that the majority of our state's rural hospitals are now using GA Notify to improve discharge planning, care coordination, and public health improvement, ensuring that high-quality healthcare is not limited to our state's urban centers."
In late 2019, GHA members partnered with Audacious Inquiry to bring its flagship Encounter Notification Service® (ENS®) to Georgia. Since then, the GA Notify service powered by Audacious Inquiry's ENS® has expanded to become the largest real-time care coordination network for hospitals across the state. GA Notify tailors notifications to the preferences of subscribed care teams by generating real-time alerts of participating hospital admissions, discharges, and/or care transfers. This allows providers to ensure patients are getting the appropriate care they need, when they need it, resulting in improvements to the overall healthcare experience.
"GA Notify is enhancing communication and the exchange of medical information between inpatient and outpatient providers," said Dr. Cameron Nixon, who is a board-certified internist and Chief Transformation Officer for Southwell, a healthcare system based in Tifton, Georgia. "GA Notify makes certain that outpatient primary care providers are notified when one of their patients visit the emergency room or are admitted to the hospital. This ensures a timely follow-up visit for a patient upon discharge, which is important in minimizing hospital readmissions and improving outcomes. Being a part of the GA Notify network helps us in our journey of continuous performance improvement."
GA Notify also facilitates compliance with the recently implemented CMS Conditions of Participation (CoP) e-notification requirement at no additional cost to hospitals. The CoP e-notification compliance is the fifth mandate that GHA's data program, Georgia Discharge Data System (GDDS), allows hospitals to comply with, including four other state mandates as a service to members.
"This is incredibly important on-the-ground progress. As the GA Notify network continues to scale, the impact of improving transitions of care after a hospital visit and creating opportunities for better patient outcomes scale alongside it," said Scott Afzal, President of Audacious Inquiry. "Compliance with the CoP e-notification requirement is certainly important, but this collaboration–on a statewide level–will enable a fundamentally better experience for patients following a hospital visit."
Hospitals interested in joining GA Notify can learn more by visiting ganotify.com or contacting the team at [email protected].
