Arthrex reimagines patient experience post-surgery with Rackspace Technology on AWS

Patient satisfaction increased

Arthrex’s postoperative, surgeon-to-patient portal makes communication easy and consistent — a difference that both patients and providers feel.

“In the room with the surgeon post-operation, the Arthrex solution helps patients and their families feel the personalized attention even more acutely; it gives them a stronger sense that they’re not just a number,” said Ken Olbrish, Group Project Manager at Arthrex. “Patients have access to materials they haven’t before and in a way, that’s much easier for them to understand. They can access it at a better time for them, when they can better digest it.” Plus, with 24/7 cloud access to digital records, patients feel like they’re receiving cutting-edge treatment. Altogether, these experiences lead to improved patient satisfaction.

Surgeon time saved

The on-demand personalized report helps fill patient communication gaps that used to require face-to-face meetings or phone consults with doctors while saving valuable medical time and resources. Arthrex’s digital portal allows surgeons to record video messages, include links to relevant studies and draw on an extensive library of medical imagery, as well as images taken during the surgery. Having this information in a digital format for posterity eliminates lost documentation and subsequent follow-up appointments for reassurance.

“There’s an entire continuum of care of benefits from this technology,” said Eric Butler, Senior Director at Arthrex. “Postoperative calls and visits to the clinics have been dramatically reduced. Nurses and medical assistants don’t have to spend time answering redundant questions that were either not well understood or not well articulated the first time.”

Case in point, a surgeon using the solution measured a 68% decrease in calls from patients compared to three years ago at the same time. A corresponding survey corroborated the surgeon's data with 92% of the 226 respondents reporting that they did not feel the need to call the office to ask postoperative questions.

HIPAA-compliant information secured

Thanks to the highly secure solution from Rackspace Technology, patients can rest assured that they are addressing compliance. “Everything is designed to be HIPAA-compliant in the service selection and the architecture,” said Amir Kashani, VP, Cloud Native Development & IoT at Rackspace Technology. “We’re leveraging both encryption in transit as well as at rest in Amazon S3.” At the end of the day, this means no one has to worry about misplacing a photocopied medical report or accidentally transferring files from a thumb drive or email to an unauthorized device.

Building technology for the future of health care

Leveraging the latest technology provided by AWS along with its longstanding collaboration with Rackspace Technology, Arthrex continues to deliver on its mission of Helping Surgeons Treat Their Patients Better™. Using this highly engaging and accessible digital communication portal, postoperative patient care has evolved into a comprehensive, personalized experience. This scalable solution positions Arthrex on the cutting edge of medical technology, supporting surgeons with technology inside the operating room, outside of it and beyond.

Executive summary

Arthrex, a global leader in surgical technology, worked with Rackspace Technology to reimagine and modernize the post-surgery experience by creating an elegant digital communications portal built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This cloud solution provides surgeons with customizable, post-operative templates they can quickly populate and make available for patients to access on-demand through a secure, HIPAA-compliant interface. As part of the solution, Rackspace Technology leveraged the nearly limitless scalability of AWS and its highly secure infrastructure to upload and share comprehensive post-surgery reports, including image and video files accessed directly from Arthrex’s medical imaging technology in the operating room.