It’s a conundrum that healthcare professionals face day in and day out. Someone gets discharged with a comprehensive list of the next steps, and poof! They’re gone. They miss their post-op appointment. They ignore a complication that arises, which should have sent them back to the operating table. They wean themselves off their meds two weeks out because “I’m feeling great!” This happens 24/7 in healthcare facilities everywhere across the globe.
There’s a disconnect between what should happen and what does happen, and while it’s always existed, it’s only becoming worse, now. Healthcare systems are losing revenue due to readmissions. Patients are stacking the odds against themselves returning to the ER for what they should’ve prevented in the first place. Care teams are burnt out trying to manage this on a paper- and phone-based system. Something’s got to give – and technology is starting to fill in the gaps where paper outlines and telephone reminders once failed.
The Real Scope of the Problem
But most patients believe that once they’ve exited the hospital establishment, someone will follow up with a call if something important arises. Not so. It’s rare for any hospital to have fewer than one hundred discharges at a time – sometimes it’s hundreds – and no two patients have the same dynamic. No two have the same follow-ups, prescriptions, or assessed risk post-discharge. It’s too complicated for someone to keep track.
What’s really happening? A nurse spends 75% of their day redialing numbers because patients aren’t picking up their phones. When someone does answer, it takes up to ten minutes to reconfirm an appointment or reacquaint them with discharge instructions. Meanwhile, that high-risk patient who needs that phone call is out of luck since there aren’t enough minutes in a day. Phone calls are effective but only when patient volume is lower; today, patient volume breaks the system down.
Statistics don’t lie – nearly one in five Medicare patients re-enter the hospital 30 days after discharge. While not all readmissions are avoidable, many are due to communication lapses – someone missed an appointment, someone failed to take their medications, or someone didn’t realize their symptoms were severe enough to warrant reaching out. Each readmission costs an average of $15,000 per patient, never mind what it costs the patient in time, effort, and health to go through it all over again.
Where Automation Actually Helps
Yet solutions aren’t about displacing nursing staff with computers; they’re about establishing automated devices to handle the basic communication intended for nursing skillsets, alleviating nursing skillset pressures to give more appropriate time to patients needing clinical intervention. Systems like Personify take care of patient outreach via automated messages – phone calls, texts, and wellness checks based on individualized care plans for subsequent communication needs.
What’s useful is prevention rather than intervention; no one’s waiting for someone to forget things and hope they reach out if something arises – no, the system does it first. A recently discharged patient finds themselves receiving a three-day post-operative text check-in on their pain level and incision status. A diabetic patient receives a text when it’s time to administer insulin. A person misses their follow-up receives an immediate message with rescheduling options.
Numbers matter in this approach, too. While a nurse making calls all day may be able to touch base with thirty patients, an automated system interacts with three hundred in that timeframe alone while flagging the few with concerns or who require human intervention. That way, a nurse isn’t spinning her wheels leaving voicemail after voicemail – she’s effectively helping those who need her help for real instead of routine communication.
The Technology Behind the Solution
But these platforms do more than send messages; they track responses, monitor statistics, and elevate issues needing assessment. If a patient states they’ve been having some pain or strange symptoms during an automated check-in, that information gets elevated immediately to the care team needing awareness. If a patient continually fails to respond to appointment reminder texts, that system can trigger a real care coordinator’s outreach.
Thus, while these systems may seem automated and difficult for patients to relate to, they personalize messaging through name recognition, incidence acknowledgment, and timing adjusted according to each patient’s pre-existing pattern schedules. The more human it feels versus chatting with a bot, the better – and that means access to natural language processing systems that glean context as to why talking down to someone matters less than carrying on natural conversation – digitally and on paper.
To make this work requires integration efforts from whatever systems healthcare facilities use in conjunction with their relationships and interaction devices – if the platform can’t assess EHRs with which discharge occurred, what kind of follow-up is necessary and for how long based on risk factors previously discussed – then automation becomes just one more disconnected piece of advice that adds more work instead of solutions.
What Changes When Communication Gets Better
Those systems utilizing this technology experience feasible improvement across the board – no-show rates have decreased by more than 30% when recipients are reminded via their individualized preferred method (phone call OR text OR email). Readmission rates drop because issues are caught before they become emergencies; patient satisfaction rates grow because people appreciate feeling attention even after leaving the facility.
Financial viability also matters; eliminating readmissions creates multimillion dollar savings year after year through penalty avoidance lost revenue due to missed appointments and overtried OR slots when those high-risk patients could’ve had resolution sooner rather than later when they actually needed someone else’s time and effort most. Even slight adjustments regarding whether people even take their medications showed improvements as these stats all contribute downstream avoided costs and better outcomes.
But ultimately, it’s about making life easier for care teams – they’re burning out trying to survive without this help, and automated systems reduce tons of basic work no one cares about but must complete. Allowing for ease helps focus on complicated cases and patients who actually need help versus one voicemail after another – and burnout declines when people see positive change made instead of another day gone by where business became as usual without actual real change happening at all.
The Challenges Still Ahead
Technology solves problems but adds new challenges at the same time – it’s not guaranteed every patient has access to cell phones or computers; it’s not always feasible for an older population patient who understands how to use buttons on a phone but not how text works versus a younger population who uses apps for everything else in life expect healthcare – but unless patients can choose what’s best for them – the more complicated it is to develop systems keeping everything flexible.
Privacy is also key – from sensitive health matters overshadowed by legalized confidentiality as well as information that can’t be shared unless regulated tightly – so security cannot be an afterthought; encryption must keep intruders out; compliance must keep relationships in per HIPAA regulations; if someone accesses something they’re not allowed – trust goes away faster than explosive results and impact ever could have otherwise happened along the way.
Then there’s human interaction that simply cannot be replaced – for any number of reasons – empathy cannot come through technology; active listening based on non-verbal cues isn’t part of computer logic; whatever needs to be assessed deeper than face value can’t happen via algorithm.
The point is never to discount human-based professionals – but instead – for professionals who’ve gotten burned out over years due to healthcare advancements in treatment/prevention avenues but not post-transaction check-ins – to promote better working environments where they genuinely make a difference instead of treading water like everyone else expecting failure every step of the way.
With decades behind improving clinical advancements through treatment-outcome drug development and procedural assessments every step along the way – but all of that pales in comparison if patients never get redirected with evaluations subsequently examined through doctor’s orders post-visit – which means patient-centered technology keeping people connected, engaged, and on track with any relationship goals might be just as essential as any medical learning exploration along the way.
When healthcare facilities finally bridge that communication gap, everyone wins – the patients and providers who’ve suffered enough with work environments bogged down with preventable problems that should never have even been an issue in the first place.
