Case #2. The Queens Health Network (Elmhurst & Queens Hospital Centers).

The Queens Health Network (QHN), comprised of Elmhurst Hospital Center, Queens Hospital Center, 12 neighborhood primary care centers, and 6 clinical stations located in public schools, is the largest healthcare provider in the borough of Queens, in New York City.  Serving a highly diverse population of two million, QHN fulfills more than a million ambulatory care visits a year and is a champion of preventive, primary, specialty consultations, surgical, obstetrics, and other healthcare services.

The QHN business development, community relations, ambulatory care, and referral management offices teamed to formulate a strategy to reach new patient populations and expedite patient navigation and ambulatory care delivery processes.  The goal was to improve the patient experience and prove that QHN was a center of excellence, committed to patient care that works in concert with providers throughout the borough and beyond.  The challenge was to develop an integrated solution that would (1) instill confidence in providers by expediting communication and response times; (2) return clinical data to referring providers to ensure that they maintained ownership of their patients; (3) optimize the referral office to ensure it could work more efficiently and handle expected volume increases without increasing staff FTE costs; and (4) manage new outreach activities to continue to increase the provider pool. 

QHN’s decision was to stage the development of a series of web-based functions under a core umbrella application.  Starting with public virtual tours and on-line directories, they next implemented an internal patient demographic form and consultantive services referral request form.  Once the initial platform was in production, new functionality was added, and community providers were invited to request online access, which effectively ended manually paper Faxing and all the work and risk involved.

The resulting solution effected an almost immediate culture change within QHN.  The member hospitals and care centers could now adhere to a standardized workflow and optimal procedures; providers enjoyed the benefits of faster, more reliable, less expensive communication and ease-of-use, and patients benefited with a more efficient experience.  Capacity and referral rates doubled as the cost of processing each referral significantly lowered.  QHN administration was able to identify new clinical opportunities, adjust service offering and clinical service hours, better manage no-show rates, and enhance relations with individual providers.

The QHN solution was later evaluated by the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, of which QHN is a member, and the entire program including the software was redesigned to accommodate the other 9 acute care hospital centers (See Case Study 3).  This solution, originally called CHN Advantage (for “Community Health Network”) is the foundation of Referral Stream™ , which reflects 8 years of technology, process, and business development focus.

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