CASE STUDY
IMPROVING EFFICIENCIES IN CARE COORDINATION
CUSTOMER:
Annual Key Metrics
In the short time that Confluence has been using AIDA, they have seen substantive improvements in their care coordination process:
1,306
Admin labor hours saved per year on post-acute referral management
10.17%
Reduction in avg. LOS over 12 months
86%
Off patients had referrals sent within 15 min. of case creation
1 in 4
Complex cases* were discharged within 7 days of case creation
44%
Of referrals are accepted within the same day
“With AIDA Healthcare’s modern and advanced technology, we don’t have to choose between efficiency and high-quality of care coordination. We get both! My team loves using AIDA’s tools to get their work done faster and better, so they can focus on patients”.
STACY CANADA
Dir. Of Care Management & Utilization Review, RN, MSN, ACM Confluence Health
Overview
- Overview
Confluence Health (CH) is a fully integrated healthcare delivery system that operates two hospitals and offers over 30 medical specialties, including primary care, to deliver comprehensive medical care throughout North Central Washington. With a team of more than 300 physicians and 170 advanced practice providers.
Confluence Health serves as the primary medical provider in the region, from Seattle to Spokane. It maintains its reputation as a leading health care provider, particularly in the rural communities it serves, using cutting edge technologies and offering both inpatient and outpatient services under one health care system. The organization includes 28 facilities over 12 towns and covering 4 counties. In 2021, they served 189.118 unique patients with a staff of 3.758 across all campuses.
Challenges
- Challenges
Despite using cutting edge technologies in its clinical care. Confluence Health faced challenges with its heavy manual process for patient care coordination. They relied on faxing and phoning which required lots of admin time spent researching post-acute providers and faxing pages and pages of patient information. The slowness and the constant phone tag cost their staff hours of time and sometimes it resulted in patients staying longer in their care facilities.
They were happy to hear that there was an easier, more secure solution when they heard about AIDA.
Solutions
- Solutions
Starting in 2020 in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic when they were overwhelmed with patients.
Confluence launched AIDA Healthcare in their Central Washington Hospital (CW/H) and eventually. expanded it to Wenatchee Valley Hospital and other clinics. CWH started with the stand-alone Patient Choice module and later transitioned to the fully EMR-embedded (EPIC) AIDA platform.
This enabled them to convert their manual phone and faxing process to a faster, electronic system which meant they could identify and submit referrals within a matter of minutes during a time of heightened staffing shortages.
Results and Impact
- Results and Impact
Since using AIDA. it’s helped them send referrals faster and more efficiently (hundreds of pages of patient data transmitted in minutes), increase the percentage of referrals accepted within 1 day. identify matching providers more quickly. and easily track the progress and status of every referral in a single platform. The transparency that AIDA provides means that every care coordinator can see where their referrals are in the process and proactively follow-up as needed.
This helps significantly speed up the time between admission to discharge and relieves staff of burdensome administrative tasks so they can focus on patients.
* Complex Case is defined as a patient who has 1 or more complex care needs( i.e., Covid-19, bariatic care, Medicaid-on-arrival, vent/trach management, feeding tube, colostomy care, obesity, wound care ( under/over 30 days), smokers, behavior support needs/health, etc).