No More Decaf Coffee Edition

Greetings Tonic Fans!

If there was a Hall of Shame for things that sap productivity, patient intake would be the main exhibit, right next to decaf coffee and a good romantic comedy (there isn’t an ounce of work happening until Bridget and Bobby clear up this big misunderstanding!)

So at Tonic it’s no surprise that we’ve continued to streamline and simplify this bastion of inefficiency. We aim to do for patient intake what airlines did for check-in, what broadband did for dial up Internet, and what a gallon of ranch dressing did for kale (ie., finally made it edible).

Thus in this edition of our Release Notes you will find features that further transform intake into the experience your patients expect—and your bottom line appreciates. Learn more about our intake solution here.

Ready to put the “product” in “productivity”? Let’s go!

In this Edition of our Release Notes:

1. Automated Appointment Dashboard
   
2. Confirm Appointments By Text
   
3. Convenient Payment Plans At the Point of Care
   
4. Administrative Efficiency: Single Sign On and Easy Password Management
   
5. Enhanced Real-Time Scoring Options for Patient Reported Outcome Instruments and Risk Assessments
   
6. Automated Tableau Integration for Robust Data Visualization
   

Automated Appointment Dashboard

Though Tonic has long been known for patient-facing innovation (like our survey design) we’ve continued to build equally cool tools to automate critical front office tasks too.

Our new Appointments Dashboard gives receptionists a range of key information they can’t find in their typical practice management system, such as which patients have confirmed their appointments and what specific forms and surveys need to still be filled out.

And coming soon we’re also adding intake status (has the patient arrived and when?), patient payment summaries (how much is owed and what has been collected?), and much more. This is practice efficiency writ large!

Convenient Payment Plans at the Point of care 🏥

If you are the type of person that continues to read healthcare finance journals while on vacation (busted!), you already know that the emergence of high deductible plans has meant that maximizing the collection of co-pays and past balance due amounts from patients at the point of care is increasingly mission critical.

But sometimes even the most well-intentioned patient doesn’t have the means to pay the full amount in one fell swoop. So Tonic created an integrated solution that presents different payment options in a clear and concise fashion during the intake process, and allows the patient to easily choose the best path for them. And it’s simple to deploy too: Tonic can work with whatever financing vendor you already have in place. It’s a win for patients and it’s a win for providers—a famed rarity in healthcare!

Administrative Efficiency: SINGLE Sign ON & Easy Password Management

Outside of Justin Bieber cover songs, nothing seems to rile folks up more than managing different usernames and passwords. So Tonic now makes it easy for you to enable single sign on for all your users. And if you are someone who doesn’t know what we’re talking about (hi Mom!), we just mean the ability for a staff member to have the same username and password—such as their hospital email address—as they switch between Tonic and other systems (like the EHR).

We’ve also even simplified password management too by proactively notifying users when their passwords are about to expire and allowing them to reset passwords right on the iPad in the clinic. Moreover, your IT folks will love it too since this makes it even easier to manage all users across the enterprise as well as provide yet another added layer of security. Confusion and frustration be gone (at least with logins—not much we can do about the Beebs…)!

But wait a minute, Tonic—what about all the other important use cases I run on your platform? Don’t worry, we didn’t forget to deliver a few new gifts here as well. Because we believe that patient intake is the gateway to controlling better outcomes, we’ve also added awesome new functionality for Patient Reported Outcomes and Real-Time Patient Satisfaction measurement too.

ENHANCED Real-Time Scoring Options for Patient Reported Outcome Instruments & Risk Assessments

Deploying real-time Screeners, Risk Assessments and Patient Reported Outcome surveys can be complex because many of these instruments have unique scoring algorithms. So we’re constantly expanding our functionality to include the widest range of surveys and instruments to choose from.

To this end, new on Tonic is enhanced support for surveys – such as many PROMIS instruments – that use standardized scores (like T-Scores), as well as automated thresholds for “invalids” (i.e., if a patient only answers 8 out of the 10 questions in a screener, don’t allow the data to be calculated or shown to a clinician). Even better: next up is automated CAT scoring on the iPad. And if the above doesn't make sense to you at all, trust us that there's a data scientist out there that's super excited right now!

Automated Tableau Integration for Robust Data Visualization

Though Tonic’s backend reporting platform is a fan favorite, sometimes there’s a need for even more advanced analytics and data visualization. So we’ve added real-time data feeds into Tableau (the proverbial bazooka of data analytics tools) so you can knock yourself out with insights wizardry. Tonic can push the real-time feed into your instance of Tableau (if you have one) or we can host it within Tonic for those who don’t already license it. This solution is being used by Tonic customers to monitor areas like Real-Time Patient Satisfaction and Population Health via insight rich dashboards with interactive drill-downs. Like all things with Tonic, we aim to give you an experience that’s perfectly tailored for your needs—now that’s something you can report about!