How Helix helped this practice gain RACGP accreditation
Samy Medical Group is the first Australian medical practice using Helix to successfully obtain RACGP accreditation, after demonstrating how the cloud-based solution has helped facilitate the practice’s ability to enable better patient outcomes.
According to the practice’s Business Manager and Director, Prof. Dr Martin Samy, demonstrating the benefits of a true-cloud based solution like Helix played an integral part in the accreditation process.
“If you’re serious about providing the best patient care, which is the purpose of any medical practice, you need to rely on a good information management system,” Prof Samy said. “It’s the backbone to controlling all aspects of patient interaction. That’s why in the RACGP accreditation process, there is a lot of emphasis on the efficacy of the IT infrastructure behind the medical practice.”
One of a kind, cloud solution
Samy Medical Group, which implemented Helix in 2017 while the platform was in its initial development stages, said they were drawn to the platform because it was a one of a kind, true cloud-based solution that allowed the practice to meet their goals. And immediately upon deployment, Prof Samy could see how his life became easier because of the integration and the seamless approach of Helix.
“When a patient wants to see a doctor, you need a system like Helix to book and manage the appointment,” he said. “And a solution like Helix plays a crucial part in user accessibility and good information management practice.”
For instance, when the patient visits Samy Medical Group (SMG) in Rockingham, Helix allows the reception to search for and enter the patient information smoothly and easily. While the patient waits, the reception is also able to monitor waiting times through Helix. If the waiting time is longer than ten minutes, the reception can offer the patient tea or coffee enabling a better patient experience.
Meanwhile during the consult, SMG’s doctors need a tool to enter all the patient information as smoothly as possible. Again, Helix plays a crucial key role, as it can quickly and easily identify issues, make recalls, referrals, care plans, identify medication records, and more. And once the patient leaves, Helix facilitates the recalls and reminders at SMG.
“Without Helix, I couldn’t run my medical practice,” Prof Samy said. “I could have the most beautifully painted and decorated practice, but without the power of Helix, my practice wouldn’t be able to function.”
The Practice Manager, Mrs Matilda Samy finds Helix easy to learn and apply in daily routine functions, and her staff are able to adopt a paperless system saving money and valuable time, and focus their efforts in patient triage.
RACGP accreditors
The Samy Medical Group is now the first medical practice to have successfully achieved RACGP accreditation after demonstrating how the practice leveraged the power of Helix as part of a wider cloud-based ecosystem.
“When the RACGP assessors came, they simply could not fault our Helix solution,” Prof Samy said as he demonstrated how the practice uses an innovative cloud-based ecosystem with no servers or hard drives.
“The practice runs on home-based computers which has relatively low memory,” he added. “This is because I have everything on the cloud such as Office 365, OneDrive, Dropbox and Helix that controls patient management, from the time patients book an appointment, to the time they recover.”
Prof Samy also highlighted during the accreditation process that Helix runs securely on the robust Microsoft Azure platform which meets international standards in privacy and security. “And when we talked about updates, I highlighted it’s all done automatically and seamlessly without requiring an IT person to come in”.
One of the key factors to achieving accreditation was demonstrating sound clinical risk management, which Prof Samy’s daughter, the principal GP, Dr Christabel Samy was able to demonstrate using Helix.
“Helix leverages the power of SNOMED, which means you can easily write and record clinical notes,” she said. “However, what we also wanted was the ability for the software to help generate real-time reporting and excel files, to help us analyse the various health conditions and generate reports according to various data sets like age, gender, demographics, COPDs, CPDs, allergies.”
Dr Samy highlighted how MedicalDirector works very closely with its customers to validate proof of concepts, and in this case, it was a clinical report that helped manage patients at risk within a medical practice.
“MedicalDirector was able to work closely with me to offer that real-time reporting feature as a proof of concept. When I showed the RACGP accreditation this process, the auditors were very impressed. I do believe this was the ultimate deal clincher for successfully gaining the RACGP accreditation.” Prof Samy, an international expert on Corporate Social Responsibility said. “Because of Helix, we are able to make significant cost savings and give back to the community through bulk billing and other social activities”.
Read more about Prof Samy’s story here
http://medicaldirector.com/customer-stories/samy-medical-group
