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.”

Increasing Personal Wellness through Community Portal

The awareness on personal wellness has transformed the concept of healthcare. Personal wellness has shifted the concept from treatment of diseases to prevention and management of chronic diseases.  Community wellness portals are playing an active role in advocating to people about getting more health conscious and enabling them to get engaged in their own healthcare activities in order to manage their chronic diseases on their own.

In today's digital world, wellness information is not restrained to caregivers or physicians. Many healthcare providers are starting outpatient portal solution for hospitals to help patients to meet the demand for wellness therapies and relevant education material to manage their own healthcare.

A wellness community portal performs various important functions which contribute to bringing awareness among people on various health care programs and initiatives at a national level. Some of these functions are:

• To encourage employers to enhance employees' personal and professional productivity, and their physical and mental well-being, to foster a worksite culture that supports employees to make healthy lifestyle choices.
• To promote and support programs that encourages the wellness of employees.
• Encourage habits of wellness and increase awareness of factors and resources contributing to well-being of people
• To promote general health of children at home and school
• To promote rural healthcare

To encourage healthier behavior across the nation, such wellness communities propagate and promote various wellness programs that are often tailored to serve the specific requirement of a particular community or area. iHealthConnect is a comprehensive mobile integrated, cloud based Patient Wellness Software that involves a multi-pronged approach. It focuses on wellness of patients, prevention and self-management of chronic diseases, longitudinal health and influencing patient adherence to care plans.