Today’s hospitals are focusing on techniques that will reduce patient readmission rates, which cost healthcare providers billions of dollars every year. Despite this focus, according to Modern Healthcare’s analysis of recently released CMS data, most hospitals can still expect 30-day readmission penalties in 2016.
In many cases, hospitals could be more effectively preventing readmissions, but in order to do so healthcare professionals need to ensure patients understand their condition and discharge instructions.
As part of the discharge process, patients typically receive a follow-up call at home to make sure they are recovering and that they are following care instructions properly. Getting patients on the phone, however, can be notoriously difficult for case managers, and even when the connection is successful, discharged patients often are unable to accurately provide insight into their conditions.
During discharge, patients are generally stressed, ill or simply focused on getting out of the hospital; retaining discharge instructions is simply not a priority. Hospitals have also been known to overload patients with stacks of printed materials containing pages of information on their medical issues – materials that patients don’t want to spend the time sifting through.
As a result, this vital information finds itself in the trash and patients miss out on crucial health information.
How can automation benefit case managers?
The time that case managers spend manually following up with patients over the phone – including tracking down those with an incorrect or missing phone number – is not cost effective in the near term and is unsustainable down the line.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Automated phone call technology alleviates the need for case managers to spend valuable time placing phone calls to patients who don’t require serious medical attention. This technology gives time back to case managers to focus on patients who need one-on-one attention, and allows them to more efficiently the most critical patient population.
Automation can also help track and monitor patient activity for better outcomes. For example, are follow-up appointments set up? What are the discharge instructions? Have prescriptions been filled? These are all important questions that can be answered with automation. From a metrics standpoint, using technology to track patient needs is far more accurate than relying on case managers to call and manually report on hundreds of patients; the opportunity for human error is much higher.
When discharging patients, clinicians need to clearly communicate to patients about the automated follow-up calls. If patients are told to expect an automated call, response percentages will be high. Clinicians should also inform patients during the discharge process that should they have serious issues, a live person is always just a button-press away during the call. It’s also important that patients know this is a clinical follow-up call and not someone from the business office calling about a hospital bill.
5 ways to ensure automated follow-up calls actually work
- Use simple words in the questions asked during automated calls so they can be easily understood by patients.
- Make sure a local voice is used for the recordings to reflect the regional dialect.
- Measure the activity that results from each call to manage future interactions.
- Research what time of day works best for the calls and schedule them early enough to allow the clinical team to respond.
- Educate patients before they’re discharged so that they know to expect a clinical follow-up call after discharge.
Do you think automated phone calls are beneficial?
