2012 is right around the corner and so is value-based purchasing. Both quality and patient satisfaction have never been more important. Hospital executives around the country cringe as we ring in the New Year. HCAHPS performance and reportable quality indicators from October 2011 are soon to be reported, and it begs the question: are your scores “always” going to pay you? Unfortunately, most front line staff struggle with attaining and sustaining the dreaded “always factor.” To top it off, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) are requiring higher standards for quality of care; due to hit the wallet in January. What is more challenging is that many of the perceptions about the patient experience start with visit to the ER.

Research shows that 78% of patients discharged from the ER do not understand their diagnosis, their ER treatment, home care instructions, or warning signs of when to return to the hospital. ER doctors find it difficult to manage health and wellbeing when patients are inappropriately using the ER. By constantly flooding the ERs with questions about their treatment, patients who desperately need emergency care are forced to wait. In a recent study, it was noted that nearly 20% of Medicare patients who were discharged from a hospital were readmitted within 30 days. Unplanned readmissions are costing hospitals more than $17 billion a year across America.

Patient care doesn’t end when a patient leaves the hospital. For many, something as simple as a follow-up telephone call soon after discharge can improve care transitions from hospital to home, clarify discharge instructions and remind patients to fill their prescriptions or schedule a follow-up appointment.

Post-discharge calls not only provide patients with important clinical information, they also help reduce readmissions and improve physician satisfaction. In today’s world of healthcare reform and value-based purchasing, this impacts a hospital’s bottom-line now more than ever before.

While it might be ideal for nurses to make follow-up calls on their own patients, this is not realistic for most hospitals. In fact, research shows that nurses in acute care environments typically complete 100 tasks per shift with interruptions every three minutes. Besides, even if nurses could make these calls, is it the best allocation of resources?

Beryl’s Post-Discharge calls alleviate this task from the nurses so that they can spend more time at the bedside caring for patients. In addition, our calls can be customized to provide hospitals with what they need – valuable data to make improvements – while providing patients with another communication touch point to demonstrate how much you care about their wellbeing.  While we have always provided personal clinical and non-clinical follow-up calls from a trained patient experience advocate or nurse, our recent partnership with Phytel has helped us broaden our capabilities so that we can combine personalization with automation for post-discharge outreach.

With post-discharge follow-up, it’s all about giving patients the right call, at the right time. This not only helps improve patient care, it ultimately helps hospitals improve their bottom-line.