Jailbreak Edition
Greetings to all our Favorite Tonic Fans!
Healthcare software tends to be a lot like that vexing scourge of social chemistry that seems to be popping up everywhere these days: Escape Rooms. The concept sounds great at first, but soon the door locks behind you and you’re stuck with a series of really confusing features that must be assembled in exactly one way in order to move forward. (Sound familiar?) And then right when your annoyance reaches its zenith due to a clue about Pig Latin and the periodic table, you remember that you actually paid for this sublime privilege.
So here at Tonic we’ve dedicated ourselves to
a) never going in escape rooms, no matter how much beer has been promised afterwards (fool me once…);
b) never making a customer feel like they’ve been trapped in one of these stubborn hotboxes either (beer not included).
Thus, we’ve dedicated this scintillating edition of our Release Notes to all the new features we published last quarter that help further Tonic’s mission to build the most flexible patient survey and payments platform in the industry.
Ready to further escape the rigid tyranny of healthcare IT? Let’s go!
In this Edition of our Release Notes:
More Survey Management Options Than Ever Before
Tonic is famous for our patient-friendly survey experience (at least according to our moms), but less well known is the wealth of options available to staff as it relates to managing all the surveys you’ve got deployed on the platform. To this end, we’ve added two awesome new features that make survey management even more of a breeze: Survey Packets and Survey Stitching.
Survey packets allow you to modularize your survey questions so that a section of questions can be edited once (such as a PHQ-9 module) and Tonic automatically updates all the surveys in which that section appears. This sounds arcane until you realize that — wait a minute, amigo! — I can edit thousands of surveys at the same time. Efficiency writ large!
Survey stitching means that multiple surveys a patient must complete can be assigned and combined into one seamless experience. Tonic even removes those questions that appear multiple times across the different surveys to avoid redundancy and speed up completion times. And since survey stitching saves so much administrative time, staff can be freed up for actual stitching (that was a really funny medical joke in case you missed it).
More Deployment Options Than Ever Before
With the addition of Tonic’s new “Self Check-In” mode, Tonic now supports every method of collecting data and payments from patients:
1. Via email or text when patients are outside the clinic (for completion on any phone or computer). Mobile-first baby!
2. Via Tonic’s receptionist-guided mode on the iPad when in the clinic. No more boring clipboards!
3. Via Tonic's new self check-in mode for busy — or understaffed — clinics (the iPad sits in a sleek, low profile kiosk). Totally self-service!
Even better: you can deploy any of the modes above in isolation or mix-and-match in any combination — the choice is yours… Nothing gives you more flexibility than Tonic (except for perhaps the U.S. Gymnastics team).
But wait, there’s more… If you act now you also get free shipping Tonic’s new and improved compliance engine also takes the guesswork out of paperwork regardless of which method(s) you elect to deploy above. That is, Tonic always knows which specific surveys or payment requests to serve up to which specific patient at which time and on which device. In other words, Tonic does all the work for your staff so they can spend much more of their valuable time on higher value tasks like direct patient care. Dark days of patient documentation be gone!
More Communication Options Than Ever Before
Most providers and patients love that Tonic can send out all required surveys and consent forms ahead of their appointment via email or text. Indeed, it’s a huge time saver (unlike the much maligned banana slicer — read the user comments).
But providers wanted a broader set of options as it relates to managing patient communication preferences, particularly as it relates to opt-ins. So we injected flexibility here too by allowing for all types of opt-ins, including single and double opt-in, opt-out by default, and even the ability to automatically read opt-in status from the electronic health record. (Speaking of opt-in, who would ever unsubscribe from these release notes?)
More Scoring Options (for Screeners & Pros) Than Ever Before
If you see the word “CAT” and instantly think of your feline-obsessed Aunt Edna, then this feature will likely bore you and thus skip to #5 below.
But if you see “CAT” and your heart starts racing about the freedom and flexibility that Computer Adaptive Testing can give to your screening, risk assessment and/or patient reported outcomes efforts, then break out the champagne (or Martinelli’s if you are seated at the kids table at Thanksgiving) because Tonic surveys are now CAT-enabled! In short, this “skip-logic-on-steroids” functionality gives you an even broader range of question options and scoring algorithms — all of which are run in real time to aid clinical decision making.
(EDITORS NOTE: two additional paragraphs of cat — and occasionally dog — jokes have been intentionally deleted here due to HIPAA concerns).
More Reporting Options Than Ever Before
One of our core tenets here at Tonic is to not just give you more — and more accurate data — than any other platform, but to also make any data we collect actionable in real time too. So we’ve further beefed up our reporting tools (apologies if you are a data vegetarian) to provide even more customizable views of your collected information and thus aid clinical decision-making when and where it’s needed most.
This includes broader availability of our longitudinal graphs that allow you to compare any screening or PRO score or trendline versus any other, deeper filtering of collected survey data, and a new basket of out-of-the-box reports for both Population Health and Patient Satisfaction inside Tableau (for those customers who have an automatic feed). Like a good leotard, reporting and insights should never be one-size-fits-all.
So that’s the latest and greatest batch of cool new features; we’ll be back in a few months with another fresh feast of flexible functionality for you to enjoy. In the meantime, if anyone knows the final puzzle combination to the “Sorcerer’s Garden” room please send it over — we think the guy at the front desk gave up on us and went home…
Faithfully yours,
The Tonic Product Team
(Northern Hemisphere Division)
Like what you see?
Check out some previous Release Notes here!