Improving the hospital discharge process is at the forefront of many doctors’ minds. While medical teams work hard to guarantee necessary steps and regimens are implemented to improve patient health inside the hospital, ensuring the same patient can maintain the protocol post-discharge remains challenging.
“Over the past few weeks, we’ve had a number of unfortunate situations where patients had been sent home, from our hospital and others, with very little communication about what was supposed to happen next — newly diagnosed serious illnesses and complex medical conditions, sent home on new complicated regimens with no follow-up arranged,” says Dr. Fred N. Pelzman in a recent MedPage Today article. “It just makes sense that when it’s time for you to go home, everyone should be on the same page about what should come next, who’s responsible for what, and who to reach out to for help and answers to questions that you might have going forward.”
There are also patients that leave the hospital without any clear guidelines and support on what medications to take, when to take them, and who to follow up with for various care needs, leaving them lost when a condition or question comes up. Hospitals aren’t equipped to take and manage calls once a patient has been discharged, and a new doctor is unlikely to provide care without complete medical records and/or having seen the patient, so individuals frequently visit the emergency room when unsure what to do next.
The existing system often overwhelms the patient, increasing the rate of emergency care and hospital readmissions unnecessarily. So what is the solution? According to Dr. Pelzman, “The answers lie in more support, more human resources, smarter electronic medical records, and removing inefficiencies that prevent people from doing the jobs they need to do.” He explains how discharge summaries often include a data dump of information, including notes from multiple people, endless laboratory and imaging results, and more.
“The other day, trying to find out what had happened to my patient, I spent almost half an hour sorting through a morass of notes from multiple people who’d obviously been tasked with being involved in the care of the patient, although for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what any of them were doing,” says Dr. Pelzman. “In the end, all I needed was the facts: what the patient presented with, what everyone thought was going on, what they tried, what worked and what didn’t, what was the final pathway on which they decided to proceed down, and then the goals and responsibilities for the rest of us taking care of the patient in the future.”
The problem is clear, and with HEAPS, so is the solution. The HEAPS platform is uniquely positioned to source, analyze, and summarize complex data, from all sources, into actionable insights. The platform also integrates personalized social determinants that impact health, adherence, and success rates to produce a highly customized record for care providers and payors. The result is not only straightforward records that can be accessed and used instantly by caregivers, but also a solution to managing care post-discharge.
To learn more about the HEAPS platform and how it can solve the challenges of the post-discharge process, click here.
Click here to read the full article by Dr. Fred N. Pelzman in MedPage Today.
