A picture can say a thousand words

Inefficient delivery of patient care is a significant cause of rising health care costs. Traditional methods of documenting complex processes and workflows do not translate well into the health care setting. Fortunately, an innovative hospital employee, Vinh Ton, has come up with a solution that he submitted to our Innovation Lab in Newport Beach, Calif.

Ton created “VisuFlow,” a health care process and workflow diagramming tool that consists of a collection of health care-centric stencils and templates for use in Microsoft® Visio®. VisuFlow augments Visio® mapping capabilities and helps hospital staff simplify complex processes using visual flowcharts. The stencils represent the people, places, and equipment across the health care continuum, including patient, doctor, nurse, administrator, clinic building, wheelchair, and gurney. This tool is intended to ease the task of documenting and communicating health care operations to a diverse audience. The stencils are simple to install and can be used by all levels of Visio® users. VisuFlow diagrams can be displayed on computers, tablets, and big screens for easy viewing and access.

“Documenting complex processes with text-heavy manuals is inefficient and can lead to error,” said Ton, a hospital business intelligence analyst. “People can process visual cues 60,000 times faster than text,” he explained.

Shapes can be configured in thousands of ways, depending on the user’s needs, including the ability to link external data to shapes and rapidly communicate process changes within the health care environment. Data can be stored in linked spreadsheets and forwarded as reports.

VisuFlow can track acuity, adoption, collaboration, facilities and patient experiences. Critical workflows, including inspection of surgical equipment and washing hands, have also been introduced as visuals.

The Innovation Lab worked closely with the inventor to develop VisuFlow and identify commercial distributors for the product. VisuFlow is now available for purchase through two online platforms – ShapeSource (Visimation) and Adeo.

We are excited to see VisuFlow available in the health care marketplace, and we hope that this product, which sells for only $149 per seat, will help increase efficiencies in patient care delivery across the U.S. Here is a video that explains why people use VisuFlow:

This is one of the products our Innovation Lab has been developing. We are currently vetting a substantial pipeline of potential medical products submitted to us by innovative clinicians and staff who want to make a difference in health care. A portion of commercial proceeds are returned to the innovator.