How the healthcare industry uses Lucidchart

During the pandemic, there's perhaps been no other industry forced to adapt and adjust at as rapid of a pace as the healthcare industry. 

With scores of complex processes, systems, and data to comb through, healthcare leaders turned to Lucidchart to help their teams collaborate, organize, and improve communication like never before. Let's take a closer look at several recent case studies in which companies like Cambia Health Solutions and Truitt Health utilized Lucidchart's tools to identify and implement innovative solutions to complex issues.

How a pediatrician uses Lucidchart

The quick onset of the pandemic forced healthcare workers to quickly develop and implement new processes during an uncertain and increasingly volatile time. For general pediatrician Eric Ong, that meant developing and distributing a clearly documented workflow so that his team had all the resources required to treat a patient with the correct course of action. 

As pediatricians, Ong and his team were not accustomed to intubating patients, and information provided by nearby hospitals did not apply to Ong's smaller healthcare center. He knew he needed to adapt this lengthy workflow into a user-friendly deliverable for a team of nurses who might be working long hours and may not have had time to practice intubation simulations. 

"We needed something where they can read it and get a pretty good idea of what they have to do, and do so safely without endangering themselves and other healthcare workers."

Ong set about creating a visual flowchart detailing the intubation process in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint before quickly giving up due to clunky formatting constraints. After stumbling upon Lucidchart while looking for more effective options, Ong got started and drew up his flowchart within an hour. 

As processes became more familiar and refined, Ong used Lucidchart to adapt and hone his workflow, quickly adding and adjusting steps along the way. The result was a dynamic diagram detailing the intubation process that was accessible and practical to Ong and his team. 

"The nurses who are worried about all this, look at the workflow and say, okay, we can do this," says Ong. 

With this resource in hand, Ong shared his Lucidchart workflow with other regional centers, so they could adapt their process and use it when running their own intubation simulations. 

"I've had feedback from a pediatrician at another center who said, 'There's a beautiful sense of relief from this work.' Which is huge," says Ong. 

How a consultant uses Lucidchart 

Truitt Health specializes in healthcare consulting that helps leaders optimize their strategies, technologies, and operations to work seamlessly together. Consultant Chris Crowell has come to rely on Lucidchart to help his clients focus on new efficiencies and standardizations. 

Crowell's typical process when meeting with a new client begins by learning how they currently operate and transforming that workflow into a clean, straightforward diagram with the help of Lucidchart. When navigating disparate workflows with multiple clients at any given time, Crowell saves valuable time by working off a specialized template he's developed and then customizing it for each client's specific needs. 

"A lot of workflows are similar from specialty to specialty, so we can really use templates effectively," says Crowell. 

Chris can then analyze the client's current workflow and identify problem areas or where automation can be implemented to increase efficiency. Using Lucidchart's intelligent diagramming features, Crowell then re-engineers his client's complex workflow by building a new, optimized process.

 "Lucidchart helps us capture the workflows for different clinics and hospitals," says Crowell. "Then we can perform analysis on top of that." 

When presenting his findings to his clients, Crowell can compare the current workflow and the optimized process side by side. 

"The real value is in being able to pinpoint exactly where the problems are in a workflow and highlight them. You can tell all that to a client or write it up in a report, but it's easier if you just make it a concise, visual picture that someone can quickly look at."

Crowell also uses Lucidchart to attach analysis documents that present more details on his recommendations and findings by walking his clients through the two processes. 

"When you present the optimal workflow, they can see where the problems occur and categorize those changes. It's easy for the client to visualize where they need to improve." 

How operations leads use Lucidchart 

For 100 years, Cambia Health Solutions has provided simple and personalized healthcare for families across the country. Now serving more than 70 million Americans, it's up to Scott McNamara and his team to optimize Cambia's complex workflows and present potential solutions to the executive team and project stakeholders. 

It's not always an easy task, and presenting dense information in a streamlined way can be daunting. But when an idea dawned on McNamara to fashion his process maps to read like a public transit metro map, he leaned on Lucidchart to make his dream a reality. 

To put his plan into action, McNamara developed a custom Lucidchart metro map shape library to map out complex processes such as APIs to Cambia's prior authorization process. 

"Most people have ridden a subway at one point or another, and it makes looking at it much less intimidating and approachable. More human." 

In presenting their new format to stakeholders in the department, McNamara used Lucidchart's Microsoft Teams integration, which allows all users to find the most up-to-date diagrams and easily make suggestions or add notes to the processes. 

Beaufort Jasper Hospital Services' Director of Operations, Natassia Allen, used Lucidchart to create a clear and efficient process for her newly assembled COVID-19 team just as the pandemic was forcing healthcare workers into a new way of life. 

Allen used Lucidchart’s intelligent diagramming features to quickly create a new patient screening process to help her new team quickly come up to speed. Having access to the workflow as a PNG and a published URL, Allen's team could refer to the workflow instantly on their iPad. 

"I have over 300 staff members right now stretched across three different counties and nine different sites reporting to us," says Allen. "The fact that they can instantly get the same information at the same time—it's kind of like when they discovered the internet. Everybody can be on the same page." 

The unexpected circumstances presented by the pandemic required innovative solutions to keep systems running and people safe—especially for the healthcare industry. Lucidchart is proud to provide innovative tools to healthcare leaders as they protect the health and safety of their teams, while developing new processes to best serve their patients.