The following is a guest article by Perry Price, Co-founder and CEO at Revation Systems.
The global pandemic has undeniably shaken up the healthcare industry. One of the most significantly affected and critical areas of impact has been the relationship between healthcare systems and their patients.
The reality is that in the last two years patients have grown accustomed to accessing enhanced digital experiences in nearly every other industry they interact with, including retail, entertainment, and banking. Yet, the customer experience offered by many healthcare systems still to this day, lags.
While healthcare systems continue to cite high-quality care as their primary goal, these organizations are struggling to deliver a higher-level of customer service just to meet baseline patient expectations. And in today’s world, if healthcare systems fail to meet those expectations, patients will not hesitate to seek care elsewhere that comes with a better experience. Time is running out and healthcare leaders must make sure that the patient experience comes first. And among other things, that means improving the patient transfer process.
Patient Transfers Require Excellent Communication
It may sound obvious, but rapid, accurate, and efficient communication is key to successful patient transfers. Unfortunately, many of today’s patient transfer centers within hospital systems urgently need to improve their daily operations to better solve for critical workflows that not only save patients’ lives, but also increase revenue. When patient transfer centers seek to improve operations, it typically boils down to creating greater efficiencies in one key area: communications. Any time a patient transfer occurs, a significant number of communications must take place between multiple different parties to achieve the transfer. This process is often too complex, time consuming, and cumbersome.
To illustrate the common challenges, consider the following example: A patient has been in a car accident and is brought to the nearest hospital in a rural area. Upon initial evaluation, it is determined that the hospital cannot provide the level of care necessary to treat the patient and therefore must be transferred to another hospital in the area. This decision kicks off the patient transfer process. Once initiated and before a transfer can be completed, more than X conversations between numerous staff from both hospitals with conference bridges and callbacks. This can cost the healthcare organization many thousands of dollars in lost revenue and requires many valuable hours of staff time, that could otherwise be spent treating patients.
Because these communications typically take place over the public switched telephone network (PTSN), or landlines, adding multiple physicians, nurses or other hospital resources to a single call becomes a time-consuming task, riddled with inefficient communication. Not only does this make for a poor patient experience, but oftentimes literally is the difference between life and death for patients in critical condition.
Unified Communications is the First Step
To streamline the patient transfer referral process, hospital systems must invest in their communications technology. Making the switch from legacy, on-premise telecommunications systems to a cloud-based unified communications (UC) solution delivers a variety of benefits.
Implementing a UC solution creates a greater level of security around the patient data that is shared between multiple healthcare organizations in a patient transfer scenario. When all communication involved in a transfer exists in the cloud, the need to transmit patient data via less secure methods, such as fax, is eliminated. In addition to saving time (and lives), UC helps to increase the productivity of agents, enabling them to handle multiple critical communication sessions simultaneously via chat, where communicating primarily over the phone has limited agents in the past.
When getting started, it’s important for patient transfer centers to collaborate with the IT team to evaluate existing communications infrastructure and system to identify areas of limitations and opportunity. Armed with this knowledge, UC offerings that integrate with existing infrastructure and align with communications goals can be considered. Doing homework up front will be rewarded when the implementation is smooth, and results are rapid.
Automation is the Future
As UC solutions make inroads to help streamline patient transfer communications, it’s also important to keep an eye toward the future of communications technology which is driving toward greater automation. As discussed, the current and traditional patient transfer process can involve numerous steps across multiple modes of communication. From an initial transfer request over the phone to sending the face sheet via fax to notifying the facility of the transfer through chat to paging physicians – with much more in between. Hospital systems equipped with unified communications quickly and dramatically improve the process. Those also adding artificial intelligence to the UC solution can further improve outcomes with all digital communications that automate the process, making it an easier and faster experience.
Consider the following four steps to a more fully automated process:
- First, the referring party uploads the patient’s face sheet into an online portal (no more faxing!).
- Then the referring party is placed into a chat ‘huddle’ where they await a live agent.
- Next the agent reviews the information and uploads it to the EMR cloud (no more manual input!).
- Finally, the referring party is connected with admissions, physicians, and the intake agent. Since this communication is dynamic, the referring party can enter and exit calls as necessary – making it efficient to condense processing time.
In addition to creating a more efficient patient transfer process, this new automated take on patient placement could also help to segment the more urgent transfers from the less urgent transfers (e.g., a heart attack from a patient with appendicitis).
As the healthcare system continues to undergo significant change, shifting patient communication expectations and overall experience will remain a top priority. Patient transfer teams adapting to modern and digital communications technology will have the agility to be prepared to meet expectations, provide better care and support their healthcare system.
Perry Price is co-founder and CEO of Revation Systems, a leader in cloud-based, compliant messaging and communications.
Mr. Price, the process of patient transfers is not new. There is a clearly defined and well established process for patient discharge and transfer that is feasible and proper if everyone does what they are supposed to do.
There is a growing communication problem however it is not a new development.
The main issue with facility discharges/transfers is not even a problem of lack of resources.
Case managers and physicians have the resources they need to facilitate a proper transfer/discharge.
I work directly with hospital discharges quite frequently in my job. The problem with efficient discharges is not at all what you are describing.
The problems we face with patient transfers now have been present since before the pandemic and have only worsened.
The first problem is when the patient comes into the hospital and the intake personnel fail to correctly and accurately enter patient information. Patients that come from the nursing home for treatment arrive to the hospital WITH their medication lists and yet, the medications never get reconciled by hospital staff. The patient spends their time in the hospital getting the wrong medications.
The second problem is lack of compassion. I can’t tell you how many patients we’ve had who had a hip or bone surgery due to a fall and get discharged with no pain medication. Yes, there is an opioid epidemic too, but there are also legitimate causes of pain that require pain medication.
The discharging physician is responsible for making sure the patient is set up for care until they can be seen on follow up as outpatient. Even a temporary prescription would be better than sending a recovering hip surgery patient out to a rehab facility for physical therapy with no pain medication.
The case manager’s job is to make sure the receiving facility has all the patient’s relevant information, medical history and medication list.
Accurate discharge medication lists are being replaced with interdepartmental medication transfer lists, which are NOT the same thing. Active inpatient hospital lists are being passed off as discharge medication lists. These have facility protocol medications left on them that would not be given outside a hospital setting. This happens all the time these days and it’s very disheartening to see the lack of compassion in my fellow medical professionals.
The problem is not lack of communication or resources.
We have plenty of avenues of communication and available resources.
The problem is lack of compassion and care we see from hospital/acute care staff. These days, when we get a new patient to the nursing home from the hospital, we literally spend hours trying to reconcile the patient’s medications that the hospital staff should have done before the patient left their facility. Every. Single. Time. And that is not an exaggeration. We have called every time to get clarification from case management. They either tell us it’s not their job to make sure the meds are reconciled or they tell us they can’t do anything because the patient is discharged from their system already. We bring the problem to their attention every time and they continue to ignore it.
Throwing new computer systems and cloud computing at this problem will not fix it because it is not a resource problem.