How Post-Acute Referral Automation Enhances Patient Orchestration

Last week, we took a look at how Central Logic enables hospitals to better orchestrate patient movement in, out and around their facilities. The transfer process is at the heart of so many critical periods within the patient’s care journey, yet these handoffs have historically been overlooked when it comes to optimization. Central Logic can fix that, revealing heretofore untapped opportunities for revenue growth, leakage prevention and even improved patient outcomes.

This week, following on the heels of our acquisition of Ensocare, we want to go in-depth not just on what Ensocare brings to the table for health systems, but how their systems and solutions were a logical fit with our own. More importantly, you’ll see how their solution for efficiently discharging patients to post-acute care can make your own patient orchestration more successful, allowing you to quickly and safely transfer patients to the next level of care while achieving true systemness within your own facility.

Ensocare: A Refresher

What attracted us most about Ensocare was how easy they make patient referrals to post-acute settings.

Ensocare provides hospitals and post-acute care (PAC) providers software and proactive support to manage patient transitions of care, improve efficiency in referral management processes and streamline communication between healthcare organizations.

One surprising facet of the modern American healthcare experience is just how many organizations still rely on manual processes to graduate patients to the next level of care. Case managers and even nurses, working well below their top of license, are forced to sit by the fax machine to gather and send patient packets, then check back regularly to see what kind of response they’ve gotten from prospective PACs. Or they might be faced with an even more time-consuming task: actually using a landline to dial those PACs, leaving messages, trying to find the right contact, and attempting to convey the patient’s condition over the phone.

Ensocare’s solution addresses those manual processes, helping hospitals wrest back efficiency in what has historically been an inefficient system. This functionality, working in concert with Central Logic and your EHR, lets case managers use software to instantly communicate with post-acute providers. After reviewing prospective post-acute providers with the patient, right at the bedside, it takes just a few clicks to send the referral to their chosen providers, who can then respond in their own PAC-facing version of the app.

You can see how this improves a previously cumbersome process. Rather than standing by a fax machine and waiting, or playing phone tag with those PACs, the response of “Yes,” “No” or “Maybe” gets sent right away, electronically, bringing the median response rate down to 30 minutes from what was previously hours or even days.

This video does a great job outlining precisely how the solution works:

When paired with a constantly curated network of post-acute care providers and a call-center operated 24/7 by experts knowledgeable of the ins and outs of their solution, Ensocare’s solution optimizes the patient discharge experience like never before. This has a remarkable effect on many hospital processes:

• Members of the clinical team get back hours where they’re working top of license
• All staff members are able to spend less time on discharge-related activities
• Length of stay (LOS) is reduced thanks to the increased speed of PAC response and the subsequent discharge
• It’s easier to manage capacity levels and free up bed space because patients are discharged more quickly
• Improved communication with post-acute providers ensures better insight into the patient’s post-acute journey, allowing for intervention in order to prevent costly readmissions and the ensuing penalties they can create

Bringing Ensocare Into the Central Logic Fold

With Ensocare now a part of Central Logic, our partner hospitals gain access to all those same benefits.

When we begin working with hospitals, we conduct a thorough analysis of processes, particularly those related to patient movement. What we’re looking for are areas of potential deficiency, where, for reasons of inertia, interdepartmental miscommunication or anything else, policies and procedures are falling short.

It doesn’t take long for inefficient post-acute transfers to stand out to us. An unoptimized discharge experience checks so many boxes that prevent hospitals from maximizing their revenue potential.

Acquiring Ensocare lets us, and in turn you, address this all-too-common problem. If discharges have been an area where your organization has struggled to reach peak efficiency, you now have an opportunity to address these impediments. We can help you move past manual processes, achieve insight into the patient journey beyond their discharge, and streamline your operations to accommodate faster discharges than were previously possible (and at greater volume).

The addition of Ensocare’s technology and robust post-acute care provider network to Central Logic’s solution enables patient orchestration across the care continuum.

From before your patient enters your facility, to the moments they receive care and then as they transition to whatever the next care setting may be, your patient access center can map the entirety of the patient’s journey and make impactful operational changes that improve their experience, your experience and your revenue potential.

We can help you assess, react and iterate across the entire spectrum of care. And we can’t wait to show you the benefits that brings to your health system.