Electronic data interchange clearinghouse Availity has partnered with analytic and care management services provider Medecision to improve and enhance hospital healthcare transitions and decrease the number of hospital re-admissions that could have been easily prevented. Patient readmissions account for almost $30 billion in healthcare costs annually.
The healthcare market as a whole is striving to improve the areas of quality outcome improvement and cost reduction. Hospitals and IT health companies in particular are working to lessen the volume of readmission to avoid being penalized by the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which penalizes healthcare providers with readmission rates that are higher than the average.
By combining Availity’s Health Information Network of hospitals and physicians with Medecision’s Aerial care management system, patient admission and discharge information will be readily available so that healthcare managers and physicians can come up with a post-discharge care plans as soon as discharge approval is given. The information will be available in real-time through an automated process, which corrects what has traditionally been an inconsistent and slow manual process.
Availity will be able to access admission and discharge transactions and then automatically send that information from the patient management system to Medecision’s Aerial program. Aerial then matches the patient record, generates and approves the discharge request. This updated process skips the discharge department’s queue, which can get slow and bogged down due to the volume of requests it receives.
A patients’ primary physician is also identified and is notified that the patient is in the process of being discharged. The physician can then determine a follow-up care plan.
Availity’s and Medecision’s integrated solution addresses the needs of all parties involved in the discharge process, which will reduce the amount of patient readmissions.
“By enabling physicians, hospitals and health plans to exchange time-critical information at the moment of discharge, we resolve workflow inefficiencies that present barriers to best practices in care management,” said Russ Thomas, Availity CEO.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
