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Emergency room physicians are familiar with patients who frequently return to their hospitals for care.
But ER physicians have little time to assess how many times that person has visited other ERs within the health system and no way to know if the patient has visited other hospitals in the region that aren’t connected. Patients may not be able to say or give a reason why they’re there.
That changed after Sutter Health collaborated with PointClickCare’s ED Optimization. It offers a fast look at a patient’s prior ER history and the reason for the visit, without wading through the EHR. If the reason is one of behavioral health, a case manager can be brought in earlier.
“Our biggest asset as a clinician is actually our time,” said Dr. Hamad Husainy, chief medical officer at PointClickCare.
The care insights have reduced readmissions from 3.4 to 1.9 days and length of stay from 27 hours to two or three hours because patients are not being placed on a hold. This results in better patient outcomes and financial savings.
“Savings like that, those lengths of patient stays, are tremendous,” said Dr. Ronn Berrol, medical director of the emergency department at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland, California.
For more, please listen to the conversation with Berrol, Husainy and Susan Morse, executive editor of Healthcare Finance News.
Talking points:
- Sutter has 23 emergency departments.
- ER frequent flyers can come into the emergency department between 200 and 300 times a year.
- Physicians want to understand high-risk and high utilization patients better.
- If a social or a behavioral health component is indicated, time is saved in looping in a case manager.
- Interventions are faster because the information that is shared includes drugs that work.
- ER physicians are interrupted about 19 times an hour.
- An estimated 70% to 80% of large hospitals in the Bay Area are connected to ED Optimization.
- Most ER physicians in the area have a good chance of seeing if the patient has visited another ER, when, and getting the diagnosis.
- The EHR agnostic system works with all electronic health records.
- The care collaboration gives insights into social determinants of health and mental and behavioral issues that are sending patients to the ER.
More about this episode:
Emergency medicine physicians top list of most burned-out specialties
Siloed technology and data create a big health system pain point
Children’s Hospital Colorado creates analytics resource center
Responsible health data use balances public interest and citizens’ privacy
Overcoming challenges to preserving and securing patient data
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