Filed Under: Patient Engagement, Nurse Triage Medical Answering Service Tagged With: answering service, home health, Home-Health, medical answering service, nurses, patient engagement, supporting nurses, telehealth, Triage Nurse

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a rising force in today’s tech-driven society. Many believe that AI generation systems and natural language processing tools have the potential to radically enhance the accessibility of information, even within healthcare. While it’s true that healthcare AI will help assist clinicians with burnout and improve care conditions–AI should never replace the human side of care. It should automate it.

Automation in healthcare consists of technology solutions that help boost communication, efficiency, and the overall productivity of providers. It allows clinicians more time to provide critical care, lowering care-costs, and ultimately creating a better experience for everyone involved. To bridge the gap between AI and automation, health organizations have turned to intelligent automation to include the crucial aspects of both.

What is Intelligent Automation?

The weight of administrative tasks, regulatory requirements, and staff burnout often strain healthcare budgets and the amount of time clinicians devote to patients. Automated intelligence helps to alleviate these barriers by navigating complex workflow and passing data securely from one system to another.

By combining smart-technology with trained clinical application, intelligent automation can streamline back-office functions like appointment scheduling and reduce highly repetitive or labor-intensive tasks. Providing care is exclusively human, and cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence, but tasks can. Automating everyday practices in healthcare, especially those involving patient health records, data entry, and routine communications, eliminates error, speeds up processing time and helps reduce nurse burnout.

Addressing Burnout

Being a healthcare provider is stressful, and despite most organizations facing staffing challenges, patients are relying on their providers more than ever before. When clinicians can’t provide high-quality care due to excessive stress and burnout, patients ultimately suffer the consequences. Clinician burnout has three main symptoms:

Exhaustion – a clinician’s physical and emotional energy levels are extremely low.
Depersonalization – emotional energy is depleted, also known as “compassion fatigue”.
Lack of Efficacy – doubting the meaning or purpose of your work (NIH).

It’s important to be aware and always address signals of burnout in your staff, however; you cannot reduce burnout without noticing it. A 2022 Physician Sentiment Survey revealed, “91% of respondents say the burden of regulatory requirements is getting worse, [with] 72% [of clinicians] not confident that their organization is set up to minimize the time they spend on administrative tasks so they can focus on patient care”. Luckily, intelligent automation can be used to treat all symptoms of burnout in an organization.

**Intelligent Automation for Engagement:**

Automation can be a powerful catalyst for engagement–not a replacement. Thanks to advances in technology, automated systems are creating opportunities for clinicians to streamline administrative tasks and devote more time to patients who are engaged in their own care. As intelligent automation streamlines simple tasks like medication refills and measuring vitals, clinicians have more time to commit to their patients. These repetitive activities are managed in real time by technology like connected remote patient monitoring (RPM) and automated interactive phone calls, surveys, and education that help patients take more charge of their conditions. This engagement helps providers magnify their care efforts and boost outcomes.

Automation also supports cost-effective staff deployment. Patient health and communications data, collected and reported automatically, helps providers reduce care bottlenecks and even anticipate and prevent care disruptions, like when a patient runs out of medication on a weekend. Analytics technology also accurately prioritizes and assigns tasks based on which patient needs it most and who is on-call, with a patient, or off-duty. As a result, your staff can take time to recharge without worrying about their patients after hours. And when a patient calls with an urgent need, automated portals quickly direct them to the best care provider for their situation. (HealthIT).

Maintaining Personalization:

The clinician workload is a heavy one. According to the NIH, “physicians spend more than twice as much time in the physician work room, than the time they spend with all their patients combined.” From calling patients to remind them about their appointments to making consistent and accurate patient rounds–it can be difficult to make sure tasks run smoothly without sacrificing the patient experience.

Intelligent automation creates a personalized care experience for your patients by uncovering patient insights and informing clinician decision making. One key example of this is RPM platforms alerting healthcare providers to intervene earlier if a patient is at a higher risk for certain conditions, saving costs and time down the line.

Automated interactions and alerts can assure patients their clinicians aren’t too busy, reducing the likelihood they might receive better care somewhere else. Improved patient satisfaction boosts quality scores, loyalty, and is critical to the long-term satisfaction of your organization. With this kind of patient engagement interwoven into your intelligent automation, it can produce high-quality and sustainable care for everyone (BusinessWire).

A Few Benefits of Intelligent Automation:

Improved ability to deliver quality patient care while managing costs.
Empowered healthcare workers with higher retention rates and job satisfaction.
Increased data accuracy compared to error prone manual processes
Higher levels of compliance in workflow, completed efficiently and without error.
Consistency and flexibility across interactions over time.

Ready to Integrate Automated Intelligence Today? Choose CareXM.

Even with constant technology and regulatory changes, healthcare will continue to face many challenges providing quality care. Burnout and human error are some of the biggest barriers hospice, home health, and other providers face. Embracing intelligent automation remains a key strategy for better efficiency today and in the future as the number of aging patients grows.

CareXM is the kind of experienced, clinical partner you can count on to deliver the help you need to elevate your patient and caregiver experiences. Our mission is to help our partners effortlessly anticipate and respond to patient needs with triage technology backed by our on-demand triage team. Whether you need after-hours triage, our cost-saving hybrid triage solutions, or in-house triage call-center infrastructure, we help you flex and extend your care, so you reach patients in the moments they need help the most. From home health and hospice to health systems and more, CareXM will transform your patient approach to lower operating costs.

Filed Under: Nurse Triage Medical Answering Service Tagged With: answering service, home health, hospice, medical answering service, patient engagement, supporting nurses, telehealth, Triage Nurse

Healthcare doesn’t stick to a 9-5 schedule.

As the hospice and home-health space is steadily trying to work its way out of one of the greatest staffing shortages the industry has ever seen, providers are searching for cost effective solutions to reduce nurse-burnout, while still improving patient outcomes. However, issues like high turnover and compassion fatigue still stand in the way.

An after-hours triage service, with both clinical and non-clinical staff, is the perfect solution for alleviating emotional burdens on clinician staff and improving a patient’s access to healthcare day or night. Triage staff evaluate symptoms and determine the appropriate level of care, providing an effective and timely assessment of your patient’s health problems. Plus, it allows staff time for rest and recovery, resulting in reduced levels of burnout and better staffing all around. After-hours triage provides patient support, so your patient’s symptoms are much less likely to become emergencies.

Understanding After-Hours Triage

Answering after-hours phone calls on top of other on-call and pateint care responsibilities can be extremely stressful for nurses. Imagine if one of your nurses is with a patient during a home visit…when another patient calls. Suddenly there is an impasse:

If the nurse chooses not to take the call, they risk not helping someone in need.
If they do choose to take the call, it can make the patient and family at home feel like they don’t have the nurse’s full attention.

This predicament affects the safety of the caller, the experience of the patient and family at home–leaving the nurse feeling emotionally conflicted.

Luckily, after-hours triage is the leading solution for growing hospice and home-health organizations to stop back-to-back cycles of burnout and staffing shortages. When on-call staff is unavailable, triage can help fill care gaps by routing patient calls to an after-hours triage nurse. They act as a care team extension during non-business hours, reducing the number of calls on-the-job nurses receive. Triage nurses can handle non-emergent tasks like medication refills, provide symptom management, and offer clinical support.

When it comes to more complex calls, triage nurses can locate and send an on-call visit nurse to the patient for a thorough assessment. This way, nurses focus on caring for patients and families during home visits and freeing up down time when they need it. After-hours triage addresses both nurse burnout and the patient experience, becoming a dependable cost-effective solution to a nation-wide problem.

Strategies for Optimizing After-Hours Triage

Heat Mapping & Data Analysis

Tech-enabled after-hours triage services like CareXM provide agencies with call reporting data, so you can start pinpointing staffing gaps. Heat mapping, and call tracking organizes incoming patient volume by day, time, and call length. This allows providers to identify opportunities for improvement and recognize when support is needed the most to avoid overstaffing.

Patient Health Information

Top after-hours triage providers offer a secure platform that integrates patient data directly with electronic medical record (EMR) systems so your team can anticipate and respond quickly to patient needs. As calls need to be routed, having patient medical information on hand for both the provider and triage team makes it easier to route patients to the most appropriate caregiver possible.

After-Hours Strategy

Instead of having more staff during the busiest time of the day, work towards an after-hours strategy that reduces the need for an overhaul of full-time employees. A flexible 24/7 triage and medical answering support system will provide your staff with space to unwind from work, while providing your patients the peace of mind that their health matters every minute.

Remote Backup

Although it might be tempting to outsource your team completely, this could cause fractures in your workflow. Use your own on-call team, plus a team of remote on-call registered nurses as a backup. This increases efficiency for staffing processes while prioritizing the patient. Plus, it builds in extra redundancy during localized disaster situations.

Proactive Triage Programs

A great way to optimize staffing is by implementing proactive triage programs to prevent calls and reduce call volume during after-hours. Here are a few specific program ideas:

Tuck-in calls during regular hours and medication refill reminders before the weekend begins.
Proactive patient engagement programs that keep patients on track in their wellness journey and education.
Provide training, feedback, and recognition for achievements to improve employee-engagement values.

Outcome Measurements

In a recent CareXM case study, after-hours triage allowed staff 52% more time for critical care patients and family. It’s important to capture metrics that evaluate the success of smarter staffing for after-hours triage. With new technology and analytics, serving patients goes beyond just answering inbound calls. After-hours triage gives patients access to professional medical care on the first call, every time, minimizing delays for receiving care.

In the end, “Staffing Smarter” is not just about numbers and data–it’s about people. The patients who rely on healthcare professionals for their wellbeing, and the clinicians who devote their lives to caring for others. By putting the emotional needs of these individuals at the forefront of staffing decisions, healthcare organizations can truly reflect the compassion and empathy that lies at the heart of healthcare itself.

Lower Costs and Reduce Readmissions Today with CareXM

If you feel like your team needs backup, especially during high impact times, then you might need to explore after-hours staffing. With a triage service partner like CareXM, you can back up your team evenings, weekends, holidays, or even as a daytime overflow. On-demand clinical and non-clinical caregivers will represent your office with professionalism and compassion. Messages will be recorded and are available through our easy-to-use web portal. Plus, our patient activity reporting makes it easy for your team to follow up with patients after they’re back on shift. CareXM, even helps track calls to provide you with data insights that drive even greater efficiency.

Filed Under: Nurse Triage Medical Answering Service Tagged With: care coordination services, medical answering service

Care Coordination Services: Creating Continuums Of Care

According to a Care Redesign Insight Report, created by the New England Journal of Medicine, healthcare organizations are applying coordinated care services so differently that,“7% said their patients’ care was fully coordinated between various healthcare settings.”

Today, patient-centered care must become the focus.

Health systems that successfully coordinate care towards their patients, have the proper resources, leadership, and culture to support communication and collaboration among teams of providers and specialists. This creates a continuum of care and a seamless path for patients as they navigate their healthcare journey.

Defining Care Coordination Services

In healthcare, care coordination services mean sharing information among all participants concerned with a patient’s care to achieve safer and more effective care.

This means that a patient’s preferences are known and communicated at the right time, to the right people, with the care it deserves. Care coordination keeps patients healthier, helps properly manage chronic conditions, and supports care that is consistent with their goals (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality).

When healthcare providers do not communicate effectively with one another, treatments prescribed by different providers might conflict or make the patient uncomfortable. A lack of coordination can lead to negative health outcomes for patients, excessive uses of emergency care, medication errors, and poor medical transitions.

Some examples of care coordination services are:

Creating a proactive ‘care plan’ and sharing it with family.
Helping coordinate transitions of care, like from hospital to hospice.
Monitoring, following up, and responding to changes with patient needs.
Actively working to align organization resources with patient engagement.

Benefits of Care Coordination Services

Well-designed care coordination is an important part of providing quality care. This involves organizing and managing resources necessary so that patients receive the best possible care. Here are some of the main benefits of having dedicated care:

Improved patient outcomes.
Reduced healthcare costs.
Enhanced patient satisfaction.
Smoother healthcare experience.

Care coordination is a key element to ensure that all members of the healthcare system, including the patient, understand their roles and are actively working towards shared health goals. This also offers peace of mind in knowing each member of the healthcare team understands their individual tasks.

When it comes to care providers, care coordination allows for greater patient outcomes due to better communication and collaboration between different healthcare teams. This reduces medical errors because each member of the team is kept up to date on the patient’s progress. Also it increases efficiency in the overall system of care as all members of the healthcare team understand what needs to be done when it comes to a treatment plan. This helps reduce costs associated with unnecessary tests or treatments that may occur when there is insufficient communication between healthcare providers.

Challenges and Barriers

It’s clear that care coordination is essential for health systems to thrive, but there are still many hurdles the healthcare system faces when trying to perform this continuum of care. Communication gaps, data sharing, and interoperability issues are common due to the disjointed nature between primary and specialty care sites. Health organizations that operate at different levels often don’t communicate, and this can leave a patient and their family feeling lost or isolated at such an important time.

In a recent whitepaper, CareXM took their knowledge of value-based care a step further and spokes to the importance of care coordination by describing real challenges patients face today:

“When patient-customers call, they do not want to wait 33 minutes to relieve their anxiety, get medication-administration assistance, or get a simple question answered. That is not a continuum of communication, comfort, or care, and typically leads to more 911 calls and costly ER visits. Instead, they want their phone call routed to and answered by the person who can help them the most quickly.

Likewise, our clinician-partners do not want to interrupt patient care to handle communication issues. They want up to date, coordinated information, documentation, and communication – or even real-time patient data. They want to be able to see assigned tasks and completion status. They want to reach patient’s caregivers more quickly and do not want to use their tired, emotional selves to effectively portray a patient’s situation. They want data to help ensure the continuum of care” (The Quadruple Aim, 16).

Innovative Approaches

Groundbreaking care coordination ensures that care from different providers is thoroughly communicated. There are many innovative technologies, tools, and strategies that can be used by healthcare organizations to facilitate care coordination. At CareXM we have employed a few into our approach to create a continuum of care.

Electronic health records (EHRs) are built to share information with other health caregivers and organizations like specialists, pharmacies, and emergent facilities. CareXM systems integrate with most up to date technology so we can provide up to the minute information.
Telehealth services bridge the gap between patient and provider. Features like patient call analytics, secure messaging, intelligent call routing and staff availability tracking can all be employed for a continuum of care.
Patient portals are secure, online portals that allow patients a convenient 24-hour access to personal health information. They enable patients to securely message their doctor, request prescription refills, schedule non-emergent appointments, view educational materials, and make payments.

Interprofessional Collaboration

Full communication between healthcare staff is the first step to improving the quality of care for both patients, family, and caregivers. That’s why performance sharing is a great way to span the continuum of care coordination. Obviously, patient data requires high confidentiality, but performance can be mapped out across caregivers. Communication makes it easy to see where a patient’s healthcare journey is going and how each staff member can collaborate to help best. Essentially, collaboration puts patient performance into context, and without context, it is impossible to know where to go next. Interprofessional collaboration will always allow improvement because each healthcare provider plays to its own process, challenges, and strengths.

Real-Life Case Studies

At CareXM, coordination of quality care is in our bones. Our mission is to care–about the patients, staff, and business of our healthcare partners. We help you extend your level of care. At Goshen Health, we did just that.

Goshen Health is a 3,000-employee magnet hospital. The director of home care and hospice decided her organization needed to prioritize care coordination and partnered with us. She chose to leverage business intelligence platforms and outsourced after-hours triage to take care of “things that matter the most.”

Goshen’s action plan to improve the patient and clinician experience:

Focus on people, processes, and a continuum of care that could be taken with patients no matter where they went.
Engage in CareXM triage and technology for better communication.
Restructure, convert part-time employees to salaried, full-time employees with productivity expectations.

After some time, exciting results began appearing:

Patient complaints stopped.
Overtime expenses dropped 70%
Significant reduction in after-hours calls.
Notable improvement in clinician documentation & virtual mentoring.
Savings allowed for more full-time case managers, evening, and weekend staff.

According to the director, Rebecca Alexander-LaBroi, “CareXM has been worth its weight in gold and moved us toward our goals in patient satisfaction related to response times and colleague work-life balance”.

With CareXM you gain an experienced, clinical partner you can count on to deliver the help you need to elevate your patient and caregiver experiences. If your goal is to create care that impacts everyone around you, we would love to show you our approach to continuums of care.

Whether you need after-hours triage, our cost-saving hybrid triage solutions, or in-house triage call-center infrastructure, we help you flex and extend your care, so you reach patients in the moments they need help the most. From home health and hospice to health systems and more, CareXM will transform your triage to lower operating costs. reduce burnout, improve outcomes, and elevate the patient experience.

Let us extend your care coordination services today.