FAQs: Connecting patients at the crossroads in care
Q. How are patients engaging with their care providers, health care organizations, and their personal health care?
A. An increasing number of patients expect virtual access to nurses and clinicians – for care appointments, to ask questions about medications, or to seek medical advice. Patients need and want more information, support in navigating the system, and access to care. Without that support, patients often feel frustrated and disconnected from their care, which can have an impact on their overall health outcomes.
Q. What are some opportunities for more patient support?
Q. What approach works best for providing more support with already stressed resources?
Q. What steps should health systems and hospitals take when they aren’t seeing patients engage with the outreach?
Q. How can improved patient connection make a difference?
Q. How can you ensure the right level of intervention and when would it have the maximum impact for patients?
Q. When it comes to targeted post-discharge outreach, are physicians/care teams able to flag someone who may not meet the criteria specifically, but they think needs to be follow-up with?
Q. How do you close the feedback loop when it comes to getting the information from the patients to the group that needs to take action?
Q. What are you seeing across the country as the biggest challenges and reasons hospitals and health systems are not already doing this kind of outreach?
A. Many organizations are trying to do patient engagement effectively, but with the heavy lift of live phone calls, which gets very expensive, very fast. There’s no system to create closed feedback or reporting to get the information to the person who can take action. What’s needed most are clinically integrated technology solutions that connect back to EMR, allow the opportunity for closed loop reporting, and exist at the cost position you need to be able to make it work. These types of solutions are becoming available in the market now.
Q. Are there sustainable funding mechanisms for these types of programs?
Q. How can using a program like Connected Care help solve strategic challenges a hospital might be having?
A. A program like our Connected Care solution integrates with and complements the hospital’s current strategies to expand the reach and impact of clinical and non-clinical patient support resources, increasing the rate of patient engagement, reducing avoidable readmissions, and improving HCAHPs.
Research from multiple external sources, including Harvard Business Review and Deloitte) show that just a 5% increase in HCAHPS scores is correlated to a 1% increase in operating margin for hospitals.
