Stratify and Manage Your Emergency Patient Populations: The Importance of Streamlined Follow-up Communication

Healthcare leaders and strategists are looking for simple solutions the U.S. healthcare system should engage that will curb spending, improve care quality and reduce costs driven by avoidable readmissions and poor self-management of chronic disease. As current hospital and health system performances are assessed and graded on quality, safety and the patient experience, consistent patient engagement throughout the care continuum and more efficiently managed care transitions are areas of opportunity, both in the hospital and in the emergency department.

The tipping point for emergency departments

Overuse of emergency departments is a big pain point for hospitals, with a 35 percent increase in ED visits between 1998 and 2010, from 94.8 million to 127.27 million, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Recent statistics published by the National Priorities Partnership also show that about 56 percent of ED visits are avoidable, resulting in $38 billion annually in wasteful healthcare spending related to emergency department overuse.

With population health management and accountable care strategies growing evermore important to improve quality care and readmissions, hospitals can look at monitoring patients who have entered the ED with high-risk conditions, or who are at risk for an inpatient event. By monitoring and following up with live calls post-discharge or release, you not only show patients that you care about them, but also have the ability to engage the patient and learn if additional symptoms or concerns have arisen. For chronic patients, multiple touch points are required to ensure they are managing their conditions properly.

In preparation for an unmanageable influx of patients coming into the system, the patient care plan is shifting to address many patient issues in a streamlined, well-coordinated fashion. To make this influx more feasible, identifying patient segments from a high acuity/risk ratio and tapering these segments can make follow-up communication more targeted, scalable and will help align touch-points with the proper sense of urgency and attention.

Providing appropriate follow-up care across the wide range of patient groups can improve patient outcomes, care quality and the overall patient experience. This effective management of a targeted patient population will also increase revenue and improve reimbursements through reduced ED cost and utilization.

Prioritizing ED patients: Impact on satisfaction

A large Midwest, integrated multi-hospital health system implemented ED post-discharge calling after it experienced poor satisfaction scores in the emergency department. The ED's "overall rating of care" and "would you recommend" questions were tracked and compared over a four-year period of time, and satisfaction results proved higher for those patients who received the post-discharge follow-up call. In 2011 alone, patients who received a follow-up call ranked their quality care satisfaction 16.1 percent higher than those patients who did not receive follow-up communications. Additionally, patients who received a follow-up call stated they were almost 11 percent more likely to recommend the health system to others in the community than those who did not receive follow-up communication.

Patients who receive follow-up calls become increasingly more satisfied with their overall quality of care as they feel they are being monitored and cared for by the hospital across the entire care continuum. Not to mention it provides another touch point for the hospital to watch for key indicators of escalation in time to prevent avoidable readmissions.

By collectively and seamlessly addressing patient satisfaction, discharge and medication compliance, appointment follow-up and scheduling appointments during these touch-points, other hospitals will too see better patient compliance, fewer inappropriate visits to the emergency department, reduced readmissions and improved patient experiences. 

The solution

Post-discharge communication works to improve population health management among high-risk patients, boosts patient compliance, improves the patient experience, provides opportunity for more efficient care coordination and prevents unnecessary readmissions — all potential drivers of increased revenue leads. By looking into strategic post-discharge planning and outbound communications, healthcare organizations can heavily impact their bottom line by shielding their reimbursement exposure and routing ED patients to the proper point of care, in-network.

Direct and prompt follow-up to discharged emergency patients can help better manage patient populations, avoid readmissions and improve patient satisfaction, all of which contribute to patient retention and revenue. To apply this to your facility or system, calculate your ED Follow-up Program ROI.

Steve Whitehurst is chief customer and strategy officer at BerylHealth, a technology based patient experience company. Mr. Whitehurst's focus at BerylHealth is to manage the overall patient experience and client facing teams, while also monitoring and aligning BerylHealth's overall business strategy with that of healthcare organizations' concerns within the market. Mr. Whitehurst welcomes your communication at steve.whitehurst@berylhealth.com , or he can be found on Twitter @Steve_Beryl .

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