Redesigning Hospital Discharge System for a World-Class Healthcare Network

Discover how Clinovera worked with one of the largest not-for-profit hospital and healthcare networks in the United States, to optimize their hospital discharge system through a custom software solution that redesigned the patient care and workflow processes with quality and safety top of mind.

About the Client

• One of the largest not-for-profit hospital and healthcare networks in the U.S.
• Business: A network that includes 15,000 providers and more than 2 million patients
• Summary: Engaged to redesign a hospital discharge system to provide actionable information, better communication and more successful outcomes to streamline the discharge process
• Services: Hospital Discharge System

Description

Our client was ready to completely redesign the patient care and workflow process and approached Clinovera to develop and implement a custom software solution.

The client had the following goals:

• Reduce Hospital Acquired Conditions (HACs: CAUTI, CLABSI, VTE, HAPI, Falls), ex. Quickly identify “at-risk” patients from an aggregate unit or team views.
• Improve discharge safety by addressing risks of readmission.
• Facilitate advanced care planning so doctors can quickly access patients’ medical history, recent diagnosis, and procedures. With all information available, it is easier to reassess and decide on further treatment.
• Find opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration during operational rollout. 

During the discovery phase, the Clinovera team found the following challenges:

• There was no data, or it was old data, for quality audits and feedback from doctors. Some data was lagging from 1 week to 5 months.
• Some tools were available to help (ex. RWB reports), but they were not comprehensive or flexible enough to help with quality or safety.
• High cost of real-time feedback
• It is difficult to make business/process metrics usable for front-line clinicians.

Results

Clinovera developed The Patient Safety Learning Lab (PSLL) dashboard to reduce gaps in quality and safety infrastructure for delivering real-time, optimize actionable insights and feedback to front-line clinical staff at the point of care, and promote interdisciplinary communication and ensure the transition from research into 0peration.

The newly developed discharge process starts when a patient is admitted to the hospital. Members of a multidisciplinary care team, jointly and in collaboration, contribute to the discharge documentation throughout a patient’s hospital stay. 

For quality and safety audits, the system provides real-time statistics on both the patient experience (for example, the number and proportion of visitors who have completed the survey and the way they passed) and data on internal use of the dashboard among staff (with information on top users, graphs of interactions by day and week, busiest days, etc.).

To support this new system, Clinovera designed and developed a flexible and extensible clinical documentation framework which was reused to develop an Emergency Department. Clinovera’s engineers continue to maintain the web framework and are developing a mobile version of the patient app.