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Wake Forest Hospital targets readmissions

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CIOL Bureau
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ATLANTA: Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, a 1,004-bed, academic medical center based in Winston-Salem, N.C., has chosen RelayHealth’s RelayCare for proactive hospital readmission management, to help reduce preventable readmissions, improve patient health status and reduce costs.Hospital readmissions occur when a patient’s health requires additional inpatient treatment for the same condition within 30 days of a hospital discharge.

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The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimate that hospital readmissions — many of which may be preventable — cost Medicare and Medicaid plans alone more than $15 billion annually. This amount includes increased costs to patients and other healthcare payers. In an effort to reduce costs associated with preventable hospital readmissions, CMS seeks to incent more hospitals to implement hospital readmission management programs through alternative reimbursement methods.

Hospital readmission management programs help hospitals reduce preventable readmissions. Preventable hospital readmissions occur when a patient is not able to afford to have prescriptions filled, does not fully understand discharge instructions or is confused about scheduling a follow-up visit. RelayCare hospital readmission management is a protocol-driven system that helps healthcare providers ensure — and document — that patients understand and are following discharge instructions, helps them monitor symptoms, helps ensure follow-up care is sought and more, all to help keep patients healthier and help avoid hospital readmission, as a press release adds.

Wake Forest Baptist will use the RelayCare system to enable and document protocol-driven, post-discharge outreach to patients. The goal of post-discharge outreach is to reduce readmissions by ensuring patients understand their discharge instructions, make and keep necessary follow-up appointments, have the medications they need and are taking them properly and have access to any post-discharge services they need, such as home care or in-home oxygen.

Kim Carrison, Wake Forest Baptist director of physician and community health access, said, “We’ve identified that the greatest number of readmissions occur in the general medicine population where patients have multiple comorbidities. The RelayCare hospital readmission management module will help us implement a more robust, protocol-driven patient call-back program. By documenting multiple patient touch points and helping ensure patients are adhering to their discharge instructions, we expect to lower our preventable hospital readmission rate. After general medicine, we will work with our cardiology service line to implement a cardiology hospital readmission management program.”