New app, technology to hasten hospital visits

Acuity Link, a technology company that assists hospitals and medical transport, officially announced availability of its new cloud-based software.

The software is a comprehensive discharge workflow tool allowing healthcare institutions to better manage discharges by improve the process of booking non-emergency transportation. This helps healthcare institutions to run more efficiently and improve bed utilization.

Many hospitals worldwide have increasingly struggled with patient discharge workflow and throughput process. This has been affected by higher demands in patient care, no tools to manage medical transportation providers and an outdated system for ordering non-emergency transport for patients.

“The process for ordering a non-emergency ambulance and discharging a patient has essentially been stuck in the 1970s and was booked almost entirely by phone, until now,” said Alex Theoharidis, CEO of Acuity Link. “Prior to our software, hospital administrators and clinicians would need to pick up the phone, potentially call several non-emergency transport companies, and relay information that could easily be misunderstood or documented improperly, which required valuable and lengthy periods of time from clinicians and medical transportation dispatch personnel.”

The average time it took to book a non-emergency transport was 12 to 14 minutes per call, and after that, the patient would often have to wait more than an hour to be transported.

Once Acuity Link is adopted by a hospital, administrators and clinicians can now request, schedule and track patient non-emergency medical transportation directly from a web-browser in real time. Ambulance crews are connected to the hospital’s Acuity Link system via smartphone or tablet. From the Acuity Link mobile application, crews can respond quickly to incoming transport requests and receive clinical details and all pertinent information pertaining to the assigned transport.

Additionally, with Acuity Link’s geo-location technology, those performing the discharge of a patient are alerted when the transport is responding and arriving.

More than just providing an efficient non-emergency transportation booking process, the software also provides detailed analytics for healthcare executives and medical transport providers.

“Acuity Link takes the guess work out of managing non-emergency medical transportation and provides valuable resource planning tools for health care institutions,” said Theoharidis. “This data is something ambulance service providers and hospitals have never had before, and it is significantly impacting patient throughput, clinical outcomes and bed utilization in a positive fashion.”