What is your current role at CarePort, and what does that entail?
My official title is the Director of Product Management. In this role, I work to build a roadmap – a set of features and enhancements that we will build – for our Care Management solution. My role is to define what goes into that roadmap, and then work with our development team to deliver those features and enhancements to our clients.
Can you tell us a little bit about your background?
I started with Extended Care Information Network, which some people know as ECIN, back in 1999. I worked within that organization, which was acquired by Allscripts in 2008, until 2012. In April 2012, I took a sabbatical. In 2017, the CarePort team reached out and asked me to join them. I came back in 2018, and I’ve been here for 2.5 years!
Can you explain what product changes were made to Care Management during COVID-19 to help our customers navigate the crisis?
One of the amazing things about our organization is that it’s capable of being very nimble, turning on a dime and quickly delivering features and functionality for our clients. The COVID-19 enhancements that we delivered is a great example of that.
The COVID-19 features came about from both our constituents and our clients. Hospitals were trying to transition patients to post-acute care organizations and they needed to know which facilities were able to take COVID-19-positive patients. Before the features came out, case managers and discharge planners spent hours every day making phone calls to determine the capabilities of their post-acute partners. We found a way, through the use of a survey tool for our post-acute providers – nursing homes, home health care, infusion and others – wherein they could quickly respond to a few questions upon logging in to the product to automatically update their profiles that hospitals see in the Care Management tool. For example, one question was, “Do you accept COVID-19-positive patients?”
From our perspective, this information was instrumental in quickly updating those provider profiles. We then elevated and made very visible that information for hospitals, so that as those case managers and discharge planners were searching post-acute providers, they knew the capabilities of those providers – eliminating many phone calls and delays in transitioning patients. As of last week, we’ve had close to 18,000 post-acute providers update their profiles through our survey responses. I think that’s an amazing response rate.
There are also many rules around whether post-acute facilities are allowed to accept COVID-19-positive patients, or patients who have had COVID-19 and recovered. If the facility can take the patient, do they have to be negative? How many test results have to show a negative result before the facility can accept them? Another COVID-19 feature that we’ve rolled out is to take clinical data, whether lab results or ICD-10 codes that are coming through the system, to flag a very simple attribute called a “Managed Admission Reason.” We share that data our constituents, and as referrals are created it’s easy to find that data – the referral status – on the front page of the referral so they don’t have to hunt for the patient’s clinical status. That data also flows to CarePort Connect, for those customers who are using that product – which is beneficial to them.
What is your favorite part about working on the Care Management product?
I love building features – the whole aspect of strategizing, building a feature, talking with our clients and understanding what their needs are, tuning and defining what that feature is to meet their needs, and watching how that feature really makes a difference in their organization. If you look at the tools and features that we’ve built, we’re solving very manual or painful processes. We’re automating and simplifying that process, and enabling communications. My favorite part is watching those features go out the door and hearing from our clients what they like about those features. Also, if they don’t like certain the features, what aspect is it that they don’t like so that we can tweak and tune those features to make them better for our clients.
What activities do you enjoy in your spare time?
I’m a runner. I run in groups, even during the pandemic. I live in a community where we can all run next to each other, six feet apart, down the street. I run distances. My favorite distance is a 10 mile, and I like to do 10k runs and half marathons. And now I’m doing virtual runs!
Do you like to travel? What has been your favorite destination?
I do, I’m a voracious traveler. My travel interests are anywhere and everywhere. In my early days of traveling for client meetings, I would visit the client and I would work, go back to my hotel room or get to the airport and fly out. One of the things I’ve learned is that every city has some amazing things to do or visit.
For me, traveling – whether to cities across the US or across the world – is learning about and meeting new people, learning new cultures, experiencing their food and what they have to offer. It’s an amazing thing. It expands my horizons, and it helps me appreciate different kinds of people and different cultures. I appreciate this even more in the world we’re living in today.
Thank you to Judy for chatting with us. Like what you’re hearing from CarePort? Take a look at our other recent blog posts.
