Claire Cressionnie at Graystone Medical put it this way: MedFlow served as a check and balance, and if their eyes did not catch it, MedFlow did. Which was very, very relieving.
Relief is an unusual thing for a piece of software to produce. It is worth asking what was being carried that got put down.
The failure mode you cannot see
Most operational problems announce themselves. A claim is denied, a schedule is empty, a phone line is backed up. You know the problem exists because it is generating noise.
Missed care generates no noise. A patient who was never identified as due does not call to complain, because they do not know. The referral that quietly never closed does not appear on any list of things that went wrong.
That is a hard thing to work under. You cannot tell whether you are catching everything, and you cannot tell how much you are missing, so the only honest position is to assume it is more than zero and keep worrying.
Why a second pass changes the feeling
A check and balance does not make anybody less diligent. It changes what diligence has to cover.
If a system is reading every record every day and surfacing what is due, then the question shifts from whether anything is slipping through to whether the system and the team together caught it. Those are different anxieties, and the second one is much easier to live with, because it is answerable.
This is also why we record every action against the record it touched. Not only so a program can be defended later, but so that the team can see what happened rather than hope.
Relief is a legitimate outcome
We usually talk about outcomes in two languages: the human outcome, meaning the patient who got what she needed, and the business outcome, meaning the program that survived scrutiny.
There is a third that does not fit neatly into either. The practice can breathe. The staff are not carrying an unbounded worry about what they cannot see.
It is harder to put on a slide than a completion rate. It is not less real, and in our experience it is the thing practices mention first.