Seattle's Swedish Medical Center To Incorporate ECIN's Automated Discharge Planning Into Throughput Efforts
Pacific Northwest's leading healthcare system will automate discharge planning to increase departmental efficiency and patient satisfaction
Chicago, IL - Case management technology provider, ECIN, announced that Seattle's Swedish Medical Center will bolster its throughput and patient satisfaction efforts by deploying a Web-based discharge planning application that streamlines the discharge to a post-acute care facility process, while also enabling patients and families to make more informed extended care provider facility choices.
ECIN's ExtendedCare Professional system is a powerful workflow automation tool that enables healthcare organizations to decrease patient length-of-stay, enhance throughput, while improving patient and family satisfaction. ExtendedCare Professional connects hospitals with a database of more than 85,000 extended-care providers including nursing homes and other senior-living facilities, home healthcare agencies, DME companies, transportation providers and community-based post-acute services.
Automating post-acute facility referrals eliminates the cumbersome and costly process that has a case manager or discharge planner wasting hours every week phoning and faxing to secure post-acute care services one provider at a time. Instead, the ExtendedCare Professional application sends a detailed electronic referral across ECIN's proprietary database and interested providers reply –often within minutes. The patient and family then receive a discharge packet that details their facility options. That packet's breadth of facility options and depth of information on each provider allows patients and families to make an extended care facility choice that precisely meets their needs. Physicians and families still control the discharge process, but have exponentially more information in a fraction of the time.
"Swedish is very focused on giving the right care at the right time, every time, to every patient we see. Implementing the ECIN software will help us do this by improving our communication with the post-acute care organizations in our community, enabling us to streamline the discharge process," said Cathy Whitaker, CNO of Swedish Medical Center. "Using ECIN, along with other process changes, such as our discharge redesign, we will be able to improve patient care by providing more information about discharge placements to our patients and better continuity of patient care within the community.
The automated discharge application will also provide Swedish with a tool to sharpen throughput efforts. Eliminating the "paper shuffle bottleneck" at the end of the patient flow process reduces the amount of days that the payers deny payment (deniable days) and frees up inpatient beds.
"We are very pleased to be partnering with ECIN to automate some of our discharge management processes. We expect this new system will enable our discharge management staff to be more efficient in their communications with post-acute care organizations, thus allowing our clinical staff more time to focus on patient care," said Cal Knight, COO of Swedish Medical Center.
"Partnering with an institution as prestigious as the Swedish Medical Center sends a crystal clear market signal that ECIN provides value," said ECIN President and CEO Jeff Surges. "We are very pleased that, after a deliberate competitive review, the Swedish Medical Center chose the ECIN system to increase patient satisfaction and throughput."
SOURCE: Extended Care Information Network, Inc. ("ECIN")