RSMUS.comMicrosoft Dynamics 365 Field Services (Field Services) is a magnificent Dynamics CRM capability that enables organizations to optimize their field services that are rendered in off-site locations owned by clients and customers within industries that include: telecommunications, engineering, power utilities, home services, and of course healthcare. With Field Services, an organization is empowered to deploy timely resources to the needed destinations. This is supported by request management including optimized scheduling, contract management, inventory management, mobile capabilities, communications, and other capabilities. With such a robust set of capabilities, Field Services provides a complete solution for healthcare, particularly for providers that render services at customer locations.
When patients require additional services in their home or even inside a health care provider’s (HCPs) office, the services often include support for a patient requiring complex medicines (e.g. Specialty Drugs). These types of services are normally categorized as types of in-home nursing, injection training, and education programs that require specialized Field Nursing Staff (FNS). These types of services for patients can be managed by Field Services, particularly with dedicated staff who have the training and expertise to support patients while driving adherence to prescription schedules. Using Field Services in this capacity ultimately provides a platform to improve the health outcomes for those patients. These services may also be leveraged for HCPs as well. At times, HCPs may require services to assist with their healthcare operations. These types of services include providing edification on complex medicines or assistance with navigating multifaceted insurance billing procedures or the Medicaid/Medicare processes.
These additional services require operationalizing and managing face-to-face contacts (FFCs) which many activities and metrics might be associated. Field Services proves to be an effective enabler for services that are rendered in the field. Some of the identified activities which are associated with these types of services include:
- Time and Costs
- Outcomes and Notes
- Required Resources(e.g. product utilization or FNS utilization)
- Scheduling
Field Services can capture how these additional services are rendered on behalf of patients or HCPs by categorizing capabilities such as Skill Types and Territories. This ensures that experienced staff and needed resources are allocated and scheduled to provide a particular service. The territories may be aligned at many levels that include National and Regional. For example, a healthcare organization providing FFC services may require aligning the FNS resource to a Regional Pharmaceutical Team in order to assist with an HCP’s education on a new therapy. Resource Skill Types may be aligned to FNS to ensure that the right qualifications are available to support the provided FFC service request.
After all, Field Services provides the means to enable the FNS to schedule patients and HCPs’ FFCs utilizing system capabilities like the Schedule Board and Scheduling Assistant. The process may even require leveraging the Map capability on Field Services to visualize the FFCs. This use case could be leveraged to identify service requests or support services that have been scheduled and those which have not been scheduled. The Field Services Map capability assists with mitigating service bottlenecks nationally and regionally as they are visualized and identified, e.g. requests are building up for Nevada where the organization doesn’t have a licensed FNS.
A simple scenario where ideally Field Services could be leveraged to better serve Patients and measure their adherence and outcomes is that Field Services utilization would empower an organization to track Patient Details, Drug Program Details, the Patient and their provider touch points (e.g. phone calls), as well as the FFCs. Tracking the Drug Program details, for example, should include the start of therapy which is a key milestone in a patient’s journey to improved health. With the complexity of modern medicine, FFCs appointments might be required and a plan developed for a particular patient which may be determined by:
- The patient demographics
- Certain risk factors
- Another determination important to the organization’s healthcare model.
What is important is that the creation of the FFCs would include presenting established material and advanced training programs that align specifically to educate the patient on how the product should be stored and how the drug should be administered. This would normally be completed during an initial FCC appointment with a possible follow-up scheduled. The follow-up could be a telephone call, but at times additional FFC appointments are required. The cadence is extremely important as it allows for metrics to be defined around patient adherence or other expected outcomes which address specific questions, such as:
- Are the patients more likely to adhere to the drug regimen if visited by a nurse?
- Do patients stay on drug regimens longer if they are contacted by a nurse periodically?
- Do patients stop taking their medicine because they have concerns?
- What are the patient’s concerns?
- Has the patient had an adverse reaction?
With Dynamics 365 Field Services, RSM has the expertise to work with your organization to deploy a system that is robust and adaptable to your organization’s patients and HCPs services while ensuring that your organization has taken the appropriate steps to remain compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH).
For more information about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Services, contact our experts at RSM.855-437-7202
By Brian Connelly for RSM
