BOISE, Idaho and WEST DES MOINES, Iowa – October 5, 2017 – Kno2™, the company that optimizes patient document exchange for everyone in healthcare, and Briggs Healthcare, a trusted partner and a leading provider of a variety of compliance tools to the long-term care, assisted living, home care, hospice, hospital, physician and clinics and other healthcare markets, today announced a partnership agreement.
The combined capabilities of these two leaders in their respective areas will give post-acute care organizations the agility to meet rapidly changing compliance requirements, enhance efficiencies and quickly expand interoperability. It will also accelerate their transition to electronic documentation no matter where they are on that journey, enabling them to significantly reduce readmissions, improve patient care, and decrease administrative costs in a space that is urgently seeking relief from operational expenses. All post-acute care providers will be able to benefit from the partnership, from those who use paper for the majority of patient charting all the way through to those who have a fully deployed electronic health record (EHR) system.
“This is an important strategic step forward because it brings together two organizations who have an immense presence in post-acute care, as well as in other areas of healthcare,” said Dustin Epstein, chief digital officer at Briggs Healthcare. “There is a natural synergy between our two companies. Briggs is the gold standard for paper-based forms for post-acute care, and has now taken a leadership position in electronic forms. Kno2 is the most widely deployed platform for connectivity and interoperability for EHR vendors in that space. By pooling our efforts and resources, we can make it easier for post-acute care providers to fully adopt electronic documentation. This will enhance patient care, ensure compliance with government requirements and drive down costs while also making them more attractive referral partners for hospitals and health systems.”
From paper to electronic
Briggs Healthcare has long been the most dominant provider of paper forms in the post-acute care sector. These forms are used to capture a wide variety of patient/resident health information to document compliance with federal and state requirements, as well as day-to-day care coordination activities, in the most clinically friendly and efficient manner possible. Many post-acute providers lag behind acute care facilities in implementing EHRs and continue to rely on Briggs Healthcare paper forms. In addition, many post-acute providers that have or are implementing EHRs are choosing to maintain usage of Briggs Healthcare forms for clinical purposes including familiarity, value-added content and compliance purposes.
To address this issue and help ease the transition to electronic documentation, Briggs Healthcare developed electronic versions of its forms under the eBriggs brand. eBriggs enables post-acute care providers to move to fully electronic documentation or to print the forms on-demand rather than ordering pre-printed forms. Print-on-demand eliminates issues of obsolescence since the forms are always updated automatically in the system, ensuring that staff is using the most current forms. It also mitigates the cost and environmental impact of disposing of boxes of obsolete forms held in inventory.
With the integration of Kno2’s electronic document exchange capabilities, post-acute care providers now gain electronic connectivity to hospitals and health systems, making them more attractive referral partners, while joining the more than 2.5 million providers in Kno2’s national healthcare directory. It also gives these facilities the instant ability to participate in electronic, secure exchange of patient records, even in the absence of an EHR.
Electronic forms, in conjunction with secure and interoperable document exchange – all for the same investment being made in paper forms today – will be a significant enhancement to those still using patient charts to manage care.
Interoperability with EHRs
Post-acute care providers that already have a partially or fully deployed EHR also stand to benefit from the new Briggs Healthcare/Kno2 partnership. They immediately gain access to the entire eBriggs form library to address important compliance and regulatory needs beyond the key assessment, which they can print on-demand if necessary.
In addition to obtaining connectivity and access to Kno2’s national healthcare directory, in many cases providers can take advantage of Kno2’s integration within their current EHR. This advanced integration gives facilities the ability to use a well-known and familiar form to document care while charting the information electronically, making it easy to attach directly to a resident/patient record. Kno2 is currently integrated into roughly 70 percent of the EHRs designed specifically for post-acute care providers.
“The partnership of Kno2 and Briggs Healthcare reflects and reinforces our shared commitment to uniting all healthcare providers everywhere,” said Jon Elwell, CEO of Kno2. “It takes a dedicated effort, combined with easy-to-use yet powerful tools, to raise the level of connectivity and electronic document exchange for post-acute care providers. Our mutual vision is that our combined technologies will finally bring into the fold the post-acute care providers and complete the circle of patient care.”
About Briggs Healthcare
Briggs Healthcare has been a trusted partner and a leading provider of a variety of compliance tools to the long-term care, assisted living, home care, hospice, hospital, physician and clinics and other health care markets for more than 70 years. Briggs serves more than 50,000 customers with professional documentation systems and forms, compliance services and data submission and analytic capabilities through our subsidiary SimpleLTC. Visit Briggs online at BriggsHealthcare.com for more information.
About Kno2
Kno2™ optimizes patient document exchange for everyone in healthcare. The company’s cloud-based platform improves the healthcare experience for providers and their patients by making the sharing of documents easy, affordable and secure. Even healthcare providers with limited resources can participate in the simple, structured exchange of patient documents—without changing their workflow or technology infrastructure. The Kno2 platform captures and exchanges documents from virtually any source, ranging from a fax machine to an EMR/EHR. The intelligent platform determines the most interoperable format and method of exchange for a document. All of this functionality is available through a simple set of APIs or through Kno2’s provider portal. Learn more about how Kno2 adds value to patient document exchange at www.kno2.com.
Konica Minolta named Industry Group Leader on the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index