Ciox — a company focused on increasing access to medical records — recently partnered with a nonprofit health system based in Virginia Sentara Healthcare to pilot a tool that makes it easier for expectant mothers to access their health records.
Based in San Francisco Datavant acquired Ciox in a $7 billion deal which closed in 2021. One of Ciox’s flagship products is its patient request toolallowing patients to easily request their medical information from their provider.
“It’s a simplified tool that takes a process that used to be arcane and complex — one that involved fax machines and in-person showing — and distills it down to a fairly simple, easy-to-fill-out form,” Shannon West, Ciox chief innovation officer. said in an interview.
Before launching its maternal health pilot program with Ciox, Sentara Healthcare already used the company’s patient request tool. The health system has partnered with Ciox for years, using its technology to help mine medical data for use cases such as closing care gaps, making Medicare risk adjustments and responding to payment integrity audits.
For the new pilot at Sentara, Ciox is improving its patient request tool to ensure more new mothers can access their medical records at the click of a button. With this enhancement, the tool uses the patient’s term to calculate future dates for health services spanning prenatal to postnatal care. After a mother-to-be fills out a simple application form, Ciox sends her a resume by email.
The tool also gives patients access to all of their health data from about 10 months before delivery to about 5 months after delivery, West said.
“Typically, your pregnancy medical records don’t follow you around as you visit different providers or go back to your typical primary care physician,” she pointed out.
The fact that patient pregnancy data is siled into silos is problematic because providers can use that information to predict complications and intervene earlier, West said.
To measure the impact of the pilot project, Ciox and Sentara will measure the number of applications that expectant mothers submit. The partners will also collect qualitative feedback as they solicit user comments from each request submitted, West said.
The pilot launched by Ciox and Sentara is a response to an executive order issued by the White House in late 2021, West said. The order specifically calls on the Department of Health and Human Services to “test methods to automate patient access to electronic prenatal, birth, and postpartum health records (including lab results, genetic tests, ultrasound images, and clinical notes) to improve the patient experience.” in maternity care, health outcomes and equity.’
Following the program, Ciox will make the enhancement to its patient request tool available to all of its customers nationwide. More than a thousand provider sites have implemented the patient request tool and it has been used by more than 700,000 patients. Patient reviews revealed that more than 95 percent of those patients were satisfied with the tool, Ciox said.
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