With two thirds of our nation’s overall healthcare costs spent in hospitals, most of what's driving that cost is associated with the care given before and after surgical procedures – not the time spent in surgery.
Bruce Kennedy, Vice President of Provider Development for MobileSmith Health, discusses how working together with AT&T will help hospitals reduce cancellations and complications across episodes of care while improving workflows and lowering costs.
Q. Same-day cancellations can be disruptive for both hospitals and patients alike. How are MobileSmith Health and AT&T working together to reduce cancellations and patient readmissions?
Kennedy: Same- or near-day surgical cancellations can negatively impact OR utilization and surgical team efficiency. For hospitals, Peri™ by MobileSmith Health acts as a perioperative early warning system, allowing procedure rescheduling based on cancellation risk. Peri’s Adherence Dashboard informs providers, surgical managers and schedulers of a patient’s pre-surgical adherence violations so that proactive decisions can be made to engage the patient to get them back on track or reschedule the upcoming procedure.
Q. How will the integration of Peri with AT&T’s digital hospital solutions improve care delivery and outcomes?
Kennedy: Better patient preparation translates to a better patient experience. Patient readiness for surgery also improves post-discharge recovery. No care delivery process is perfect but the ability to easily assess a patient’s level of preparedness for their procedure and activities post-procedure saves lives and reduces readmissions. Peri empowers the perioperative team to assess the preparedness of each pending surgical patient in real time. With Peri, the team now has the ability to intervene and help patients recover to avoid a last-minute cancellation or a preventable readmission.
Q. What impact will Peri have on a hospital’s bottom line?
Kennedy: Perioperative management often consists of over 15 full time employees working in patient administration, surgical prep and provider teams. So time efficiencies can often determine any ability to impact surgical costs, facility utilization and growth-based revenue opportunities. Through decreasing preventable surgical cancellations, Peri can improve perioperative team utilization by upwards of 40%. With Peri, a 15 surgeon orthopedic practice, for example, can save an annual total of 486 hours through operational efficiency and drive an additional $3.7 million in surgical revenue. Even if only two of the 15 surgeons in the practice use Peri for their patients, the cost of Peri is covered within the one year.
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