Follow-up Measures Reduce Patient Re-admissions

Nowadays, hospitals and care settings in the US are deploying care management technology to reduce the rate of hospital re-admissions. The use of the population health management solutions enables multispecialty practices and healthcare organizations to ensure appropriate follow-ups for discharged patients. 

It is a common trend in the US for most big healthcare practices to employ various hospitalist programs to separate inpatient from outpatient care and to regulate the presence of the discharged patients in hospital. These huge healthcare practices are keen to implement various software and applications to provide quality care and boost productivity.  Outpatient portal solution for hospitals is one of these initiatives that help providers to have full access to patient records while maintaining a constant communication with the primary care physician. 

Some providers are using SaaS applications, mobile patient portal solutions and other Healthcare IT software to identify gaps in care, communicate with patients regarding preventative or chronic care, automate care management, and measure effectiveness in population health management. With the help of these measures, the hospital staff is able to contact their discharged patients on a daily basis and assess their health and well-being, especially patients with two or more chronic diseases. The number of contacted patients can go up to 14 to 40 everyday depending on the size of healthcare settings. According to Claudia Webb, Executive Director of Elmhurst Clinic on care management solutions, “By precisely targeting patients at high risk for readmission and automating outreach to them, regular follow-ups allow our staff to spend less time attempting to contact discharged patients and more time providing specific care to those in need.”