When Shore Physicians Group was founded in southern New Jersey a little more than ten years ago, only about half of all adults in the United States owned a smartphone, and much fewer than that used them for any sort of healthcare purpose. Healthcare consumerism hadn’t even made it onto the scene.
Fast forward to 2023, and the New Jersey-based physician group has expanded to include more than 60 providers and offices in Margate, Marmora, Northfield, Ocean City, and Somers Point — with specialties from internal medicine and neurology to urology and orthopedics. Its newest office, located in Mays Landing, opened this past September.
The healthcare landscape has also changed in numerous ways since 2012. Digital health pervades the industry, with most patients expecting their providers to offer products and services that are quick and convenient. It has led to more of a focus on connected care, which enables real-time, electronic communication between a patient and a provider.
Using technologies like mobile apps, telehealth, remote patient monitoring (RPM), and secure text messaging, connected care allows care to be personalized and patient-centered. Just as important, it markedly helps promote patient engagement and access to care, especially for those in rural areas of the U.S.
These consumer and technology trends led Shore Physicians Group to promote a new mission statement: “Keeping You Well Connected.” As the statement notes, the goal is to “deliver superior medical outcomes by connecting the people and communities we serve with the highest-quality, most technologically advanced, and compassionate care in the region.”
A key component of this mission was digitizing its check-in process. The physician group wanted a solution that would seamlessly integrate with athenaNet, was easy to use for both staff and patients, and offered end-to-end training, support, and ongoing responsiveness to needs. The choice was Epion Health.
What stood out for Shore Physicians Group? Among other advantages, Epion’s deep and discrete integration exceeded the capabilities of other vendors and was the only one that did not require a separate dashboard to reconcile patient-entered data.
Since implementing our cloud-based, HIPAA-compliant patient engagement platform, Shore has achieved a patient utilization rate of nearly 90 percent and a 37 percent increase in time-of-service (TOS) collections. Check out our newest case study to find out more about how the physician group has improved the patient experience and established uniformity and consistency across all of its locations.
