Hospital discharges are notorious for delays, causing frustration for patients and their families, and creating inefficiencies in healthcare operations. Qventus, leveraging AI, provides solutions that address these challenges by optimizing patient flow and improving discharge processes.
Why Do Discharges Get Delayed?
- Increasing Complexity of In-Patient Stays: As Dr. Jason Cohen, Chief Medical Officer, Inpatient, at Qventus, explains in a HealthcareIT Today interview, the complexity of in-patient stays has increased significantly over the past decade. Patients generally require more comprehensive care, necessitating a balance between clinical needs, hospital operations, payer regulations, and social determinants of health.
- Additional Services or Resources Needed: Patients often require extra care once they return home, like physical therapy or home care services. Such patients may have to be in the queue in need of special care home services or nursing home care until such services can be obtained or provided by service providers employed by the organization – sometimes taking significant time.
- Communication Gaps: Effective patient discharge depends on collaborating with doctors, nurses, therapists, social workers, and discharge planners without any communication hindrance. The process can be prolonged if there is some conflicting information or unclear steps to ensuring timely discharge.
- Understaffing Issues: Staff shortages lead to delays as overworked healthcare providers struggle to keep up with discharge paperwork and coordination. Dr. Cohen points out that care managers, essential to ensuring safe and timely discharges, are in short supply, sometimes managing up to 30 cases at once. Many retired during the COVID-19 crisis, and the remaining staff tend to be less experienced.
- Insurance Maze: In some cases, hospitals may hold off sending people home until they have definitive information about how much money the patients owe or whether the patient’s insurance information is accurate.
- Ineffective Multidisciplinary Discharge Rounds: Many hospital teams use MDRs to conduct discharge planning early in the patient’s stay. These daily discharge-focused discussions help align discharge goals and key activities needed to meet them. However, without visualization and organization, these sessions can have poor engagement and lack focus.
Qventus Solutions for an Earlier Discharge
Hospitals and healthcare leaders can benefit from improved processes and intelligent automation, powered by our inpatient solution.
- Automated Discharge Planning: The Qventus Inpatient Solution uses AI and automation to automate discharge planning, including predicting discharge dates and barriers to discharge. By accurately predicting discharge dates and creating an aggressive yet realistic plan for each patient, care teams have more visibility into the EDD they’re working towards and can focus on ensuring the patient receives timely care. This proactive approach leads to significant reductions in length of stay and excess days. For example, HonorHealth reduced average length of stay by 0.65 days per patient with our inpatient solution.
- Workforce Optimization: Breaking down silos goes a long way in optimizing how efficiently a team can work. Qventus watches the care progression steps and automatically prompts action, like prioritizing orders for ancillary services teams. Prompts and visualizations for priorities help to organize teams with fewer manual calls or meetings to their daily workflow. Having discharge plans in place for each patient also streamlines MDRs and makes it easier for teams to coordinate care.
- Drive Accountability: Within the inpatient solution, our insights suite enables you to track progress towards your goals and analyze improvements over time, providing unmatched transparency and visibility into patient flow.
Benefiting Patients & Hospitals
Long hospital stays are financially challenging for both the patient and hospitals. Improving impactful communication and investing in effective and resilient discharge processes ensures a quicker return home for patients, relieves the burden on hospital staff and unlocks capacity to take new patients. Interested in learning how to reduce length of stay in your hospital? Download our white paper to learn key strategies to decrease excess days and established approaches of hardwiring these data-driven best practices with your team.
