Cutting the High Cost of Hospital Discharges & Easing Clinician Toil
Every chance I get, I ask questions of our hospital customers. What does your discharge workflow look like? How many clicks does it take to send a referral? How many times per day does your staff do that? Because what matters is that careMESH solutions take the “toil” of repetitive tasks away.
Toil is wasted hours—negatively impacting both productivity and morale.
Wasted hours mean less time for clinicians to truly connect with patients, fewer opportunities to consult with colleagues about difficult cases, and fewer chances to get home on time.
But let’s talk numbers because deciding to implement an IT solution is about far more than improving quality of life.
A customer I met with recently discharges about 3,000 patients per month manually. This medium-sized hospital (about 300 beds) sends discharge summaries to PCPs outside of the hospital network, and in many cases to another state. But even with a leading EHR, if the user can’t find the PCP in the local directory, they need to conduct a web search for the right recipient(s). That name is passed to support staff, who determines how and where to send a fax or postal mail letter—then composes either an e-fax or prints, stuffs, licks, and sends it the old-fashioned way.
That’s a lot of toil. And at what cost? Costly resources doing manual lookups? Our “back of the napkin” calculation indicates that even basic personnel and transmission costs add up quickly—nearly $1M in our example.
And we all know the real costs are much higher, due to:
Clinical and administrative staff burnout resulting from inefficient discharge processes
Lost staff time for revenue-generating services
Lower CMS Promoting Interoperability Program performance scores
Penalties for failing to transmit transitions of care and referral information in digital form
Decreased referrals due to outside provider dissatisfaction with data sharing capabilities
It is our responsibility to make the lives of clinicians easier so they can better serve their patients. By automating discharges with our National Provider Directory and Delivery Management services, careMESH is the only service provider that can fully automate the distribution of discharge summaries, including complete patient records, to any PCP in the country. We keep integration requirements light, leverage existing tools and technology standards in which our customers have already invested, and deliver secure, cost-effective services that quickly impact the bottom line.
Talk to us about our hospital discharge services—not only would we love to talk numbers, we’ll reduce toil for your team, too. Send me an email anytime.
Catherine
* https://www.the-hospitalist.org/hospitalist/article/121482/state-hospital-medicine-strong
^ https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Hospital-Administrative-Assistant-Salary