Care Team Coordination: Driving patient outcomes through better communication
This is part of Elion’s weekly market map series where we break down critical vendor categories and the key players in them. For more, become a member and sign up for our email here.
Communication failures are one of the most common causes of harmful medical errors. Even beyond more substantial medical errors, fumbled communication can lead to increased lengths of stay, escalating costs, and heightened patient dissatisfaction. After in-person care is complete, effective discharge, followups, and patient communication all impact patients’ experience and outcomes, and—particularly under VBC models—provider payments.
Defining Care Team Coordination Solutions
Care team coordination solutions address these challenges by facilitating HIPAA-compliant collaboration among clinical and care management teams. These platforms enable the development and management of care plans, task assignments, note-taking, patient content sharing, and progress tracking.
While they share features with clinical workflow management and care plan management tools, care team coordination solutions primarily focus on supporting internal team dynamics. Whereas other categories like RCM tools or patient scheduling are clearly defined by the specific workflows they facilitate, care team coordination tools are instead a natural clustering of products addressing a similar pain point—disjointed patient care—but often leveraging a variety of workflows and functionality.
Vendor Landscape
The market for care team coordination solutions is diverse, with vendors offering a range of functionalities. Some cater to specific user types, such as nurses or care coordinators, whereas others flex automation and AI-driven features. In general, we see a few groups of solutions here:
EHR native tools: It’s worth noting that most EHRs, including Epic and Oracle, offer some level of care team communication or task management. To be compelling, outside vendors must offer some additional functionality, automation, or customization.
Primarily task and communication management: Dock Health, Kabilah, PerfectServe Clinical Communication & Collaboration, Symplr Clinical Communications, Vital Care Assist, and Vocera Care Collaboration Suite are primarily communication and task management platforms, and include integration with the EHR along with some level of automated data collection or syncing of patient data. Anima, Awell, and Lumeon additionally flex automated care workflows within their task management platform.
Task management and coordination within a broader platform: Some of the broadest care team coordination platforms, Tellescope and TigerConnect, integrate the full patient engagement workflow within their coordination tools. Additionally, TigerConnect just released a pre-hospital tool that adds care team coordination with EMS services. CareAlign and Wellsheet emphasize their ability to create clinical summaries from the EHR and write to the EHR, facilitating workflows like handoff and discharge, and MDRevolution and ThinkAndor are primarily virtual nursing and remote patient monitoring platforms, though also facilitate care coordination. Spruce Health offers a tool designed for patient communications but includes care team coordination features.
Specialized tools: NetSmart Care Coordination, Thoroughcare, and WellSky offer similar care coordination features, though designed for post-acute and VBC use-cases, often including the ability to coordinate care across care contexts. Dina provides many of the same features, but specifically designed for home health and long-term care.
The Future of Care Team Coordination
We expect the trajectory of care team coordination solutions will align with several other emerging trends:
AI and Machine Learning
Incorporating AI to predict patient needs and automate routine tasks, leveraging both pre-designed workflows (e.g. when a patient does/doesn’t schedule a follow-up, alert a particular team member) or “smart” additions directly from the software (e.g. providing evidence-based recommendations based on clinical pathways). There are potential cross-overs here with:
AI facility management or RTLS tools that could initiate particular workflows as a patient moves from one area of the hospital to another.
Clinical summarization or smart EHR UI functionality that surfaces provider-specific summaries automatically from data within the EHR. (There are natural extensions here for CDS and clinical pathways tools as well.)
Clinical workflow management tools that dynamically automate task generation or completion based on actions taken within the EHR or scheduling and intake tools.
Interoperability Standards
Continued interoperability improvements could facilitate even better integration between disparate systems. It’s possible to envision a world where teams are better able to coordinate care across provider groups, health systems, or nursing facilities and home health agencies. As we see more and more consumer-facing tools designed to give users access to their own healthcare data and/or share data from wearables with providers, there are further implications to interoperability; namely, is there a point where care plan management and care team coordination tools effectively merge, essentially treating patients as a member of their own care team?