How Providence Medical Group Personalizes the Patient Experience

Providence Medical Group uses Smartsheet to centralize information, maintain accurate data, and increase project visibility to support cross-functional collaboration.

Avg. read time: 5 min

Industry

  • Healthcare

Organization Size

  • Enterprise (10,000+)

Region

  • North America

Keeping up with ongoing improvements to standards of medical practice and patient care is an immense challenge for a network of primary care and specialty clinics spread across multiple states. At Providence Medical Group (PMG), located in Oregon and Southwest Washington, more than 60 clinics must complete quarterly attestations to document their completion of new requirements.

 

Kiesha Smith
Kiesha Smith

Kiesha Smith, program manager for PMG and Clinical Services at Providence Health & Services, uses Smartsheet to streamline the attestation process by creating checklists and dashboards that enable clinic managers to focus less on paperwork and more on providing a better patient experience.

“Attestation helps us align to our strategic plan,” Smith says. “Every standard on our checklist has been piloted and proven as something that has either worked well in a clinic or rolled down from the system. It has been vetted by our Model of Care Governance Committee to make sure that it’s aligning to our standard or our strategic plan, and that it’s something that benefits patients.”

Smith draws on her project management background to help create and execute new programs at PMG. These include patient-focused efforts, such as process flows to help clinic staff ensure adherence to the unbreakable “red rules” that safeguard patient health and security. They also include innovative IT projects such as single sign-on capabilities for clinic workstations or automated appointment check-in when patients enter the parking lot.

These efforts align with PMG’s strategic goals. Smartsheet brings both standardization and personalization to clinic operations throughout the system.

Choosing a Reliable Platform

Before joining PMG, Smith had been working with the Providence Center for Outcomes Research and Education (CORE), where she managed complex data science research projects that analyzed health data to better understand and improve the health of underserved populations.

Smartsheet was part of the team’s IT toolkit, and Smith used it to organize and track CORE’s research efforts. By the time she moved to PMG, Smith had simplified a wide array of processes.

Smartsheet’s capabilities include:

  • A central source for information: If relying on spreadsheets, email, or online file shares, when colleagues made changes to different versions of a document, the conflict might not be caught until work processes started to clash. With Smartsheet, the most current information is shared and the history of updates can be traced.
  • Up-to-date data views through dashboards: PMG’s leadership closely monitors the clinics’ completion of their quarterly attestations. That required reports that could be time-consuming to compile and keep up to date. Now each clinic manager checks off completion of requirements on a clinic sheet that rolls up into a master sheet, which can be viewed and analyzed through customizable dashboards.
  • Smooth integration with other tools: Smith has created a variety of forms to capture data, from program analysis to IT equipment tracking and physician contact information. Smartsheet forms integrate easily with tools such as Zapier and Cognito Forms to help her create the right interface for the clinic teams whose information she needs to request.
  • Cross-platform accessibility: From desktop computers in a lab to handheld tablets in a patient exam room, Smartsheet data is available on any device. Teams know they can access current and accurate information from wherever they’re working within a clinic.

Visibility to Support Collaboration

Smartsheet dashboards help increase visibility for stakeholders. Executives gained a unified view of clinic efforts and can focus on areas that need attention. In addition, clinic managers can see what their colleagues are doing — and use this knowledge to improve their own efforts.

“If we are requesting that a clinic do something and they’re struggling for some reason, they can look at the dashboard and reach out to another clinic that has completed that standard, engage with them, and take back some tools to help their clinic be successful as well,” Smith says. “Allowing that transparency offers us the opportunity to work together more closely as a team and ask more questions.”

Smartsheet forms have also saved time and effort. Smith’s working with the IT team at PMG to create single sign-on capabilities for the system’s computer networks. As part of the process, IT needed to compile a list of workstation IDs at all the clinics, but were concerned that it would take staffers days of effort to visit all the clinics and inventory 50 or workstations at each location.

Smith created a form that pre-populated information fields such as clinic address, clinic manager name, and contact information for each clinic location. Clinic managers only need to enter hardware IDs and send the information back to a central sheet — no travel required.

“Making the process easier for our caregivers is huge, because they have so much that they have to do,” Smith says. “When they hear they have another survey or another form, it just adds to their workload. By making the process of collecting data easier, it’s better for us and it’s better for them. The systems we’ve created really helped us to be more transparent, to track things, to attest to things and improve processes here at Providence.”

As medical guidelines and practices evolve and the pressure to perform better continues to increase, Smith is ready to use Smartsheet to simplify and streamline the work of all the clinical teams at PMG. It’s a key part of her efforts to help the organization meet its most ambitious goals and then set new ones.

For more information about this story, please see our case study.