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    You Make the Call - Healthcare's Mandate for Post-discharge Follow Up
    You Make the Call - Healthcare's Mandate for Post-discharge Follow Up
    You Make the Call - Healthcare's Mandate for Post-discharge Follow Up
    Ebook134 pages1 hour

    You Make the Call - Healthcare's Mandate for Post-discharge Follow Up

    By Kristin Baird

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    About this ebook

    Every day, thousands of people are discharged from hospitals. While relieved to be going home, they are often frightened and insecure about caring for themselves at home. How the hospital manages follow up can make a world of difference in spotting adverse reactions, quelling fears, and providing appropriate direction. Adverse conditions can lead to costly readmissions that hurt the bottom line and dissatisfied consumers who can hurt the hospital's reputation.

    You Make the Call presents a solid case for a post-discharge call system to improve clinical outcomes and improve the patient experience. This book provides the rationale and key steps for launching a post-discharge follow-up call process. Kristin Baird offers case examples, models, and tools to help you evaluate the need for follow-up calls as well as tools for integrating them into a comprehensive care plan.

    An award-winning author and consultant, Baird's expertise stems from over 30 years as a nurse, executive, and consultant. Her passion for the patient experience has set her career path and is a driving force behind this book.

    Are you doing post-discharge follow up? Does it make sense for your organization? Should you devote resources to post-discharge calls? Read Baird's book and then you make the call.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublishereBookIt.com
    Release dateApr 26, 2016
    ISBN9781456608514
    You Make the Call - Healthcare's Mandate for Post-discharge Follow Up

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      Book preview

      You Make the Call - Healthcare's Mandate for Post-discharge Follow Up - Kristin Baird

      Dziewior

      About the Author

      Author, consultant, and industry expert Kristin Baird is President/CEO of the Baird Group, a consulting firm dedicated to transforming healthcare culture and shaping the patient experience. This is accomplished by helping healthcare leaders first understand the patient experience within their organizations and then by guiding strategies to close the gap between the current reality and the desired service vision. Baird’s Model for Service Excellence incorporates strategy alignment, leadership development, and employee engagement, as well as frontline training on behavior-based standards.

      Having been in the trenches of healthcare for over thirty-five years as a nurse and hospital executive, Baird speaks the language of someone who has been there, done that. A highly sought-after consultant, she works with individuals and groups from the frontline, medical staff, and C-suite, guiding them through culture changes with measurable results in patient satisfaction and employee engagement.

      Her passion for listening to the voice of the consumer led her into healthcare marketing and business development. Already a staunch patient advocate, it was here that she found the deep-seated bond between the patient experience, loyalty, and the bottom line. During her eight years as Vice President of Business Development and Marketing for Watertown Area Health Services (now UW-Health Partners) she led an award-winning service excellence initiative. Her initiative is chronicled in her best-selling book, Customer Service in Health Care: A grassroots approach to creating a culture of service excellence (2000, Jossey Bass). Her grassroots model formed the foundation of the Baird Model for Service Excellence, a roadmap for culture transformation and patient experience enrichment.

      Baird is a prolific author and renowned industry speaker on the subject of the patient experience and culture. She has authored Raising the Bar on Service Excellence: The health care leader’s guide to putting passion into practice, Customer Service in Health Care: A grassroots approach to creating a culture of service excellence, and Reclaiming the Passion: Stories that celebrate the essence of nursing. In addition, she has authored over 200 articles on a variety of topics related to organizational culture, patient experience, and employee engagement.

      In 2009, Baird received an appointment from the Secretary of Health as an advisor to the Health Service Corps in Washington, DC. Baird’s primary success is in coaching and supporting hospitals and health systems in achieving their missions. Her work has been the topic of various articles and workshops with such prestigious healthcare organizations as Press Ganey, NRC Picker, Avatar International, the Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development, the National Association for Healthcare Quality, the Medical Group Management Association, BerylHealth, and the Forum for Healthcare Strategists.

      Baird earned her bachelor of science degree in Nursing from the University of Wisconsin—Madison and a master’s degree in Health Services Administration from Cardinal Stritch University. To find out more about Baird Group services, contact us at (920) 563-4684 or info@baird-group.com.

      Acknowledgments

      Very few accomplishments are achieved in a vacuum. This work would not have been possible without the support of some very important people. Brittany Klokow not only edited the content for this book, she arranged interviews, secured consents, and did what she does best: kept my life organized so that I could take on this project. Mark Williard from BerylHealth collaborated with me on webinars that formed the basis for two key sections of this book. Thank you to Mark for articulating the business case for post-discharge calls.

      I extend a special thank you to the following professionals who took the time to interview with me and share their successes: Maryanne Bowersox, RN, Director of Telemetry Services, Chandler Regional Medical Center; Paul Clarke, Patient Experience Coordinator, NCH Healthcare System; Christy Erwin, RN, Manager of Referral Systems, Memorial Hospital and Health System; Jan Simdon, RNC, Fort HealthCare; Peg Smith, CNO, Chandler Regional Medical Center; Bev Haferman, RN, IBCLC, Fort HealthCare; Gina Tabone, RN, Cleveland Clinic; Dr. Robert Takla, Chair of Emergency Medicine, St. John Hospital and Medical Center. All your work is making a difference in the lives of patients every day.

      Finally, I give heartfelt thanks to my husband, Mark Dziewior, for the cover design. Once again, he’s put color to my words.

      Introduction

      Making follow-up calls to patients has always made sense to me as part of a logical progression of patient care and as a method for closing the information loop. During my years as a nurse working at the bedside, I would take care of patients while in the hospital yet wonder how they were faring once discharged to their homes. Were they doing alright? Did they understand their instructions? Did they have the help they needed? Even though I was confident in the care patients had received and the information offered upon discharge, I often had this nagging feeling inside, wondering if we should get validation that patients and their caregivers felt confident and fully prepared to manage needs at home. I strongly wished to just check in with discharged patients and see how things were going, but demands for my time at the bedside precluded me from making the calls I felt sure would make a world of difference to my patients. This compulsion for a systematic feedback loop to my patients followed me into my work as the manager of a nurse call center.

      In 1989, I was managing a nurse call center that handled 120,000 calls per year. My team of registered nurses was armed with protocols for triaging caller concerns about everything from infant teething to chest pain. The typical inbound calls were initiated by a customer with specific needs—usually symptom-based concerns—but other calls concerned physician referrals and registrations. It was not uncommon to have patients contact our call center with questions about their recent discharge instructions, medications, or follow-up appointments. It dawned on me that we had the perfect set up to manage not only the inbound requests for information, but to make outbound calls to our recent discharges as well. Hence, our follow-up service was born. Within weeks, we were up and running making follow-up calls to patients discharged from the hospital’s inpatient units as well as those treated and released from the emergency department. Back then, we didn’t have the sophisticated computer technology that exists today, but we were driven by the same goals many of us have today:

      • Validating patients’ comprehension of and adherence to discharge instructions

      • Assisting in answering questions and securing follow-up appointments to maintain compliance

      • Maintaining a warm connection between patients and the organization

      What made sense then still does and will continue to make sense in the future. Patients come in contact with hospitals and other healthcare organizations when they are feeling vulnerable, frightened, and confused. They are often hurting physically and emotionally. And, despite our best efforts at education and thorough discharge instructions, their time with us is not the optimal teachable moment. They often leave the hospital or clinic only to find themselves wondering about next steps. Now that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) are placing greater accountability on hospitals to prevent unnecessary readmissions, hospitals are scrambling to do whatever they can to ensure patients leaving the hospital maintain a connection to medical professionals and timely advice. Value-based purchasing has created a burning platform for hospitals to decrease readmissions and improve patient satisfaction.

      Improving the patient experience has always been a central theme in my career, whether it was at the bedside, in leadership positions, or in my consulting role. I’ve always felt that, regardless of the nature of the healthcare encounter, consumers should leave every encounter feeling more knowledgeable about their conditions and more comfortable in taking the necessary next steps than they did before. If we as an industry are going to create a truly patient-centered experience, we must embrace follow-up efforts as an integral part of the total experience. But success will not happen by chance—it must be created by design.

      The following chapters will provide rationale as well as tools and examples of successful approaches you can take in weaving follow-up calls into your care and patient experience game plan. When it comes to follow-up calls, it’s no longer just a nice thing to do for your patients—it’s necessary. So let’s get started now.

      Chapter 1

      Why Create a Post-discharge Call Program?

      Wanting to go home from the hospital and being fully prepared to go home from the hospital are two very different states of mind. The first acknowledges—and rightfully so—that the average patient wants to spend the least amount of time possible in a hospital. The second implies that the patient feels confident and is fully equipped to take the reins in the next stage of his recovery process. Patients may feel highly motivated to leave, but are

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