What do you like best about Buzz Medical Messenger?
Our agency is about 13 years old, so we have gone through many changes over the years regarding technology. When we started our agency in 2009, we were a 4-person crew with no EMR system to start out. Everything was done on paper, from orders to plans of care, and we even used a dial-up fax machine and all our field communication was done via phone calls or texts. It was messy! As a new agency starting out, our patient census was low, so it was manageable, but over the years, we have grown and now employ 35-40 team members with 100+ patients to provide care to every day. We are considered a small to mid-sized agency, but there are days that we feel like a giant company! We have gone through 3 different EMR systems and finally landed on one that works for us, and we have added many other technology platforms to support our growth and pursuit of continued efficiency. We utilize a lead/marketing platform that helps streamline the front end of the business and then our favorite technology platform that we use for care coordination, our beloved BUZZ! Pre-BUZZ, our agency was using everything from group text threads, and WhatsApp, to GroupMe and still struggled with good, true collaborative care coordination; plus, none of these other platforms are HIPPA compliant, but we HAD to talk to each other! An industry colleague of mine mentioned BUZZ to me a little over 2 years ago, and I was connected with the BUZZ team, and they really listened to me and understood our needs and offered solutions! BUZZ offered us a trial to get to know the product to see if it was a good fit for our team. They were patient with us while we were implementing the new platform to our field team by providing training and support and always answered the call when we needed help! A great tool is only as good as your adoption rate, so that was the hill I had to climb. So many times, a technology solution looks good to the executive team, but the end-user has to adopt it for it to actually be successful. As we rolled out the BUZZ App and built it out per our process, the team started to see the power! The way our agency uses BUZZ is that we build out “patient channels”. Each patient channel (group) is titled with the patient’s name and DOB. From there, our Intake department adds the DON, ADON, scheduler, COO, Client Care Coordinator, and the SOC nurse that has been assigned to the patient to admit. After admission, the SOC nurse communicates on BUZZ that the admission has been completed, the frequency and suggested therapy Evaluations needed. The scheduler sees that communication and works to assign the therapies and adds those care team members to the channel. If there are any other disciples that need to be added, the process repeats. In the end, a custom care coordination team has been built and ALL communication is shared with the appropriate team members so everyone has visibility of the play-by-play for that patient. This also provides a safety net with upper-level eyes on ALL channels and can step in and support or triage if necessary. This also makes case management so much better because it creates true leadership opportunities in a field-driven industry just by collective and collaborative care coordination. I ask myself quite frequently how we ever survived without our beloved BUZZ! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Buzz Medical Messenger?
There is nothing we "dislike" about BUZZ; it has only added efficiency, compliance and ease to our care coordination efforts. The only thing I would love to see, and I believe it is in the works, is that the communications from BUZZ flow into our EMR to complete the patient chart in one place. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
