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An estimated 25% to 40% of patients admitted to hospitals are discharged needing some degree of post-acute care. But the increasingly automated care delivery process too often grinds to a halt at this discharge stage.

Thousands of times each day, healthcare professionals must spend hours phoning and faxing just to identify necessary post-acute care.

As so many hospitals strive to automate the patient care process and eliminate paperwork, hospital administrators and care professionals need to know how automating this manual discharge process spikes the time available for clinical care, increases patient throughput, and empowers patients and families with information

When the process is automated, case managers can get the information to multiple extended care providers simultaneously via HIPAA-compliant electronic transmission of patient information to numerous extended care providers. This results in increased efficiency, revenue, and patient satisfaction.

A handful of national vendors, such as Extended Care Information Network, market automatic discharge planning solutions. The technology can:

Enhance staff efficiency and clinical time: Reducing the discharge planning process from hours (or days) to minutes means the case management staff can spend more time giving care.

Increase revenue: Compressing the discharge process increases hospital throughput and significantly reduces the amount of avoidable days and losses due to reimbursement denials.

Satisfy the family: Automating the discharge process exponentially increases the amount and quality of information available to the patient and family.

Case management experts agree that the antiquated manual discharge process is a bottleneck. Philadelphia-based healthcare consultancy ZA Consulting recently concluded:

"To minimize the losses due to denials and unpaid days, acute care providers must seek ways to increase staff efficiency, reduce avoidable days and reduce denials. The easiest way to achieve efficiencies in the discharge process and to increase the caseload of each discharge planner is to fully automate the discharge process. Communication between the hospital discharge planner and an ECP's admission department is a key issue and is vital in the discharge process. Streamlining and automating the discharge process can lead to significant and positive outcomes."

In the manual system, the case manager or discharge planner communicates the referral needs to extended care providers, clinicians, doctors, and service providers via fax and phone. Typically, a 20 page patient profile is faxed to 6-10 facilities until placement is secured.

But automating the discharge planning process eliminates the hours spent faxing and phoning. A confidential patient profile is sent electronically to the relevant extended care providers. The case management staff then assembles an information packet for the patient, family, and physician that describes in detail the available extended care options. Families and physicians still control discharge -- but they have exponentially more information in a fraction of the time.

Automating the final stage in the hospital stay means more clinical time, less clerical time.

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