Health Navigator
Clinical Documentation and Workflows for Telemedicine

Accurately documenting patient symptoms, having efficient workflows, and delivering high-quality care are equally important goals for telemedicine. Yet, accomplishing all three of these at the same time is difficult. The time and media limitations of a telemedicine encounter make attaining these goals challenging for clinical providers.

Health Navigator has developed a clinical vocabulary and evidence-based tools for telemedicine and eHealth applications that support achievement of all three of these goals. “We have developed a unique and innovative clinical vocabulary, set of workflow tools, and evidence-based decision support algorithms for telemedicine and eHealth applications,” said Dr. David Thompson, Founder and CEO of Health Navigator.

“Every medical or eHealth encounter has a beginning, middle, and end. The encounter begins with a chief complaint (reason for visit). Each encounter has a middle, where additional information is obtained about the patient and various workflow processes occur. Each encounter ends with a process outcome, such as possible causes, treatment, care advice, and/or recommendations for further evaluation.”

Backed by more than 20 years of research, data science and testing, the company has carefully crafted a digital health system that supports all three parts of the medical encounter.

Health Navigator facilitates the beginning of the medical encounter with its unique and proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine and Coded Chief Complaint (CCC) vocabulary. Because patients describe their symptoms in different ways, Health Navigator built its NLP engine to seamlessly convert the unstructured language or free text a patient uses to describe their reason for visit into clinical terms (CCC) that are coded to comply with systems like ICD10 and SNOMED.

For the middle of the medical encounter, Health Navigator provides nearly 500 chief complaint based templates for documenting patient symptoms. These can be used to deliver a patient-facing rapid medical history during the intake processes of a telemedicine encounter or a physician documentation checklist.

Our platform, delivered fully via an API, provides documentation and decision-support for the telemedicine industry, improving the patient and physician experience

Health Navigator has also developed evidence-based decision-support tools to power the end of the medical encounter. The Health Navigator Diagnosis engine outputs a list of possible causes, sorted by likelihood, and using patient age, gender, pregnancy status, travel history, and other clinical factors. Another Health Navigator tool is the Triage Level of Care engine. This tool provides recommendations for level of care. It can be used to develop a triage symptom checker app for consumers or help prioritize patients for telemedicine care.

Together, the Health Navigator tool set can be used to develop symptom checker, health bot, consumer engagement, and telehealth applications. “Our platform, delivered fully via an API, provides documentation and decision-support for the telemedicine industry, improving the patient and physician experience,” notes Dr. Thompson. “It is architected to provide easy-to-use building blocks for software development.”

Dr. Thompson recalls the success story of NurseWise in achieving productive results after implementing the Health Navigator platform. A medical triage and telephonic health service provider, NurseWise needed a fast and reliable medical system to deliver 24/7 telehealth support. Health Navigator allowed NurseWise to improve clinical workflows, shorten call durations and most importantly, provide a clear understanding of symptoms that reduced ‘time-to-nurse’ for patients.

“Using the Health Navigator platform, NurseWise saw its red flag rates drop from 40 to 13 percent, while immensely improving patient and staff satisfaction,” said Dr. Thompson.

In an age where telemedicine is emerging as a critical healthcare solution, Health Navigator is well positioned to confront some of the most challenging marketplace problems.

“We remain unwavering in our commitment to improve the healthcare experience and deliver better outcomes and support for patients and our healthcare partners,” Dr. Thompson added.