In the fast-evolving landscape of healthcare, the efficiency and quality of patient care transitions seem very much stuck in the past. The hospital discharge process is still bogged down by outdated legacy referral management software at many health systems, exacerbating ongoing length of stay and discharge delay issues across the industry. In this article, we examine why the historical process of managing patient care transitions through legacy referral management systems have failed to meet today’s hospital discharge challenges, and how an innovative approach, leveraging automation technology, is reimagining the future of care transitions.
Issues with Legacy Referral Management Systems
Legacy referral management systems in hospitals often have several issues that can significantly slow down the process of finding appropriate post-acute care for patients. The core problem is that for as long as health workers can remember, referral management systems have used referrals as an instrument to find post-acute care options for patients. It works like this: a patient needs post-acute care in a certain area, so case managers send out referrals to all the post-acute care providers in that area and wait to see which referrals are accepted for where the patient can go. This is often called the “spray and pray approach” – send out a bunch of referrals blindly into the market and pray for the best. While this might have been an effective approach 15 years ago, both the hospital and post-acute landscape have significantly changed since then, rendering this approach incredibly inefficient.
Hospitals are much more capacity constrained than they have been in the past, especially since COVID. It is simply not economically feasible for a patient who is ready for discharge to sit around waiting for a referral to be accepted. Moreover, the post-acute care is struggling with ongoing staffing challenges and financial issues. It is also not economically feasible for these organizations to have staff sit around and review tons of referrals all day for patients that they cannot really accept or who will never ultimately end up in their care. It is an incredibly inefficient process.
Furthermore, the referral systems in place to manage the “spray and pray” approach are not that effective, built on technology from decades ago (faxes are not that uncommon, just as one example) that does not leverage more efficient communication tools and exchanges of information. Here are just a few of the key problems associated with these systems:
- Manual and Paper-Based Processes: Many legacy systems rely on manual processes and paper documentation, which can be time-consuming and prone to errors. Coordinating between different departments and external care providers through phone calls, faxes, or physical paperwork can lead to delays and miscommunication.
- Lack of Real-Time Information: These systems often lack real-time updates on the availability of post-acute care facilities, such as skilled nursing facilities, rehabilitation centers, or home health services. This means hospital staff may spend a lot of time calling around to check availability, leading to delays in discharging patients.
- Inefficient Coordination: Legacy systems may not have efficient tools for coordinating care transitions. This can result in gaps in communication between the hospital, patients, families, and post-acute care providers, potentially causing confusion and delays.
- Data Silos: Information about patients’ medical histories, care plans, and preferences may be stored in separate, unconnected systems. This fragmentation makes it difficult to share necessary information quickly and accurately with post-acute care providers.
- Limited Integration with Electronic Health Records (EHRs): Some referral systems are still not well-integrated with EHR systems, leading to redundant data entry and increasing the risk of errors. Hospital users sometimes must log into completely different portals, or multiple portals, just to upload and transfer patients’ records from one system to the other.
- Compliance and Regulatory Challenges: Ensuring compliance with regulations and maintaining accurate records for audits can be more challenging with outdated systems. Manual processes increase the risk of non-compliance and make it difficult to track and report necessary data.
Overall, managing referrals manually is resource-intensive, requiring significant administrative effort. This diverts staff time and resources away from direct patient care. This slow and cumbersome referral processes can negatively impact the patient experience, causing stress and uncertainty for patients and their families during an already challenging time.
Replacing Referral Management with Discharge Automation
At Repisodic, we believe that referral management is an outdated approach to a modern problem. Referrals should not be used as a blunt force tool to find out where patients can transition to at hospital discharge, especially with the abovementioned referral system issues and inefficiencies. Our technology helps health systems effortlessly manage patient discharges with modern technology and an innovative approach. We address care transition issues by automating processes, seamlessly integrating with EHRs, providing real-time data, and enhancing communication and coordination across the continuum of care. Moreover, leveraging automation for the manual, repetitive tasks associated with referrals significantly streamlines operations, enhances patient outcomes, and reduces costs.
We will explore the benefits of replacing legacy referral management systems in detail in our next post, but in the meantime, we would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the current state of patient care transitions and hospital discharges. Contact us today to start a conversation!
