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Practice Unite Unveils Patient App on Integrated mHealth Platform

February 2, 2015 | Uniphy Health

Practice Unite® Unveils Patient App, Allowing Patients to Communicate with Physicians and Care Coordinators Through the Use of an Industry’s First Single, Secure, Real-time Platform

February 2, 2015- Newark, NJ: Practice Unite, a secure, customizable, mobile application platform for healthcare organizations, announced the addition of its patient application to its suite of mobile apps that improves communications across the care continuum. With the addition of the Practice Unite patient app, Practice Unite is the first company to offer healthcare organizations a single HIPAA-compliant platform that allows communication not only between clinicians but also directly between clinicians, care coordinator, home care aides and their patients through the use of customized apps on their smartphone.

The Practice Unite platform and apps enable physicians, nurses and staff to connect and communicate more efficiently with patients in real-time. Patients will now be able to interact and receive faster responses from clinicians regarding medical questions, tests or other clinical information, through the use of their mobile device, compared to those who still rely on more traditional methods of physician-patient communication.

The patient application provides new benefits for the patient population such as physician finder, a patient portal, an appointment scheduler and reminder, hospital updates, location and directions and news/tips. It also provides access to a hospital’s concierge service that connects community members to the hospital.
“Practice Unite continues to innovate its offerings to help drive the future of mhealth,” said Dr. Stuart Hochron, MD and co-founder of Practice Unite. “If we look at current communication tools used in healthcare—pagers, desk phones, email, EMRs, paper charts and reports—they represent a culture of bottlenecks and breakdowns in communication. All of these tools impact the speed, quality, and safety of patient care. The Practice Unite patient app is designed to positively impact the overall patient experience and to increase access to information, while creating two-way dialogues.”

Like many hospitals, one of the biggest challenges facing Jersey City Medical Center-Barnabas Health, a 300-bed facility located in New Jersey, has been how to improve communications among physicians, nurses, members of patient care teams and patients. Two years ago, the hospital deployed Practice Unite to improve real-time communication and connect physicians and care coordinators with each other. The hospital will now also deploy the Practice Unite patient app, broadening communications and increasing patient satisfaction as a result.

In addition to Jersey City Medical Center- Barnabas Health, Inspira Health Network will also be implementing Practice Unite’s patient app, and soon will announce how it is using an entire suite of mhealth tools to increase secure and efficient communications across its 50+-location rural facilities in New Jersey.

“We are excited to integrate the Practice Unite patient app into our existing Practice Unite platform. It has enabled our hospital to provide new benefits that our patient population has been asking for and new ways for us to connect with them,” said Joe Scott, FACHE, Jersey City Medical Center-Barnabas Health’s, president and chief executive officer. “Our patients expect the convenience of communication that mobile technology in their pocket affords them – and we can now deliver that with Practice Unite.”

According to a recent research report from FICO , eight out of ten patients have reported that they want to communicate with their medical team or physician by smartphone. The Practice Unite app delivers exactly this type of experience.
“The Practice Unite patient app is one more addition to the Practice Unite platform. Practice Unite is unique in the way it helps solve many issues for healthcare systems. The patient app creates a new way for physicians and care givers to communicate and engage with their patients; it creates a secure channel for convenient communications; and it also encourages patients to use patient portals for increased engagement and dialogue with physicians,” said Adam Turinas, Practice Unite’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “The goal of the app is simple: to improve patient satisfaction and care coordination.”

About Practice Unite®
Practice Unite is designed to be a healthcare organization’s platform for HIPAA-compliant mobile communication and collaboration applications. Solutions achieve high physician adoption, are easily tailored to a healthcare organization’s unique needs, and interface with the EHR and other clinical systems. Practice Unite backs solutions with unmatched customer support.

Practice Unite helps customers leverage Smartphone technology to improve their performance, reduce their costs and risk, and improve patient satisfaction. Practice Unite’s solutions include patient-centric in-patient, post-discharge, and long-term care clinical applications for care teams and patients, as well as operational applications that automate bed management, service recovery, and other processes.

Clinicians, care teams, and support staff can easily find each other and communicate using secure text and photos, voice over Wi-Fi, and secure video teleconferencing. Patient-centric collaboration tools include rounding lists, care team texting, and shared patient notes that all synchronize with EHR and ADT systems. Patients can also communicate securely with select members of their care team.

Solutions are tailored to streamline existing clinical workflows, and include delivering critical labs, diagnostic imaging and pathology reports, and consults to clinicians’ mobile devices. This is implemented through HL7 interfaces with the organization’s EHR and other clinical systems.