A care map is called a clinical flow process or a patient flow process. It can be used in benchmarking to look at performance flow processes. It’s taking a component of what you’re doing for a patient, outlining who is involved.

Q: How do we know what senior management really wants?
A: We have found it goes beyond the operational to how our program benefits the [larger] system, such as referrals and physical therapy.

The start of a new year is an auspicious time to chart a course for an innovative occupational health delivery model based on experience, reasonable forecasts and willingness to accept a certain degree of risk.

Why are you putting out fires? A lot of fires are fires that have occurred before. That said, hire and train well so people are less likely to make errors. Problems are inevitable; the best thing to do is document what went wrong and prevent that fire from occurring again in the future.

Getting occupational health-specific software to work in concert with larger institutional software such as Epic, Meditech or Cerner can be a daunting task for occupational health programs. What can program personnel do to facilitate a smooth integration?

Marketing expert Dan Dunlop is not a fan of his industry’s conventional tools, i.e., the radio jingle, the television spot, the mail circular. In a general session address at RYAN Associates’ 29th Annual Conference in October, Mr. Dunlop said most of the time in marketing we’re just spewing crap. “It’s narcissistic. It’s all about us,” he said. Worse yet, it doesn’t work.

The prevalence of health clinics operating in the workplace, known as on-site clinics, is soaring, and with good reason.

Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), employer healthcare cost containment strategies have become more important than ever.

Q: We are very busy and have little time to gather and analyze outcome data. What should we do?
A: “We find great value in not having to pull out data as we need it and instead tracking data along the way”

State workers’ compensation coding and billing rules believed to be in need of an overhaul have captured the attention of occupational medicine physicians. An American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM) committee has put the wheels in motion to introduce alternative coding and billing ground rules that state workers’ compensation systems and/or insurance carriers could apply to certain evaluation and management (E&M) codes—a subset of Current Procedural Terminology (CPT® American Medical Association) codes.