AristaMD, a digital healthcare company focused on care transition solutions, has launched a combined offering for primary care providers that aims to give patients faster access to specialty care.
The solution integrates patient-provider matching, electronic referrals to specialists and eConsults into one interoperable solution, aiming to reduce unnecessary specialist visits and administrative overhead.
“There’s such a huge access problem in the country,” Brooke LeVasseur, CEO of AristaMD, told Fierce Healthcare. “We have a huge specialist shortage, and it’s only getting worse.”
With AristaMD eConsults, which has been an offering since 2015, PCPs can request guidance from hundreds of virtual specialists on specific cases, getting a response within 24 hours. About a third of all referrals are appropriate for eConsults, LeVasseur said. Nearly three-quarters of eConsults result in the PCP being able to treat the patient without a referral immediately.
That also frees up access to specialists “for the patients with the more acute, more complex issues that truly do need to be seen,” LeVasseur noted.
When a face-to-face referral is needed, AristaMD’s referral management services match patients to the most appropriate specialists based on their insurance, location and the sub-specialty required. Referrals are electronically ordered, which the company says helps remove the traditionally burdensome methods of phone and fax for PCPs. The new offering closes the loop on communication with specialists once a referral is made and is said to improve overall care coordination.
AristaMD also staffs a referral coordination team that can submit cases for eConsults on behalf of PCPs. Otashe Golden, M.D., is a family medicine physician strained for time. Prior to AristaMD, half of Golden’s small team was focused on referrals, spending 50% of their week on the task. With the latest offering, they can focus their time on clinically meaningful resources like patient education. “It’s opened the door for more clinical care,” Golden told Fierce Healthcare. “To be able to outsource that has been amazing.”
Because the platform also captures outcomes of care episodes and new diagnoses, those data could be beneficial to payers wanting to target specific interventions to specific members, LeVasseur said.
AristaMD works with thousands of providers at clinics around the U.S., with users in nearly all 50 states and D.C. In addition to PCPs, it works with health systems that leverage its platform while using their own in-house specialists to answer eConsults.
