Residential Healthcare Group Increases Referrals and Improves Follow-Ups Using Pings™

Residential Healthcare Group (aka Residential) was looking for solutions to help more effectively manage patients as they transitioned to different care settings and eventually back home. Residential used to place outbound calls to hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and patients to follow the patients as they transitioned from different care settings before starting home health or hospice services. This often resulted in dozens of outreach calls throughout the week to confirm patient discharge dates to ensure timely initiation of care.

In addition, Residential would dispatch a nurse to a patient’s home only to discover that the patient had been admitted to the hospital, wasting valuable resources that could have been applied elsewhere. Residential sought to help more effectively manage patients as they transitioned to different care settings and eventually back home.

Since Bamboo Health had already integrated with Residential’s electronic medical record platform, the Pings™ solution took only days to customize and implement for Residential. The clinical leadership at Residential also championed this new solution to garner internal adoption quickly.

Several teams within Residential utilize Pings to better manage patient care:

• Care Coordinators, who follow Residential patients as they transition through the care continuum until they start or resume home health care services
• Home Care Specialists, who provide regular health outreach assessments to patients who have been discharged from home health services
• Home Care Consultants, who work with facilities to determine when and how to appropriately transition patients home

Residential benefited from receiving real-time information from Bamboo Health as it improved the effectiveness of their outreach efforts. The Pings notifications help to identify patients who are in need of intervention, improve timeliness of care and efficiently allocate clinical resources.

In October of 2017, Residential Home Health received a Ping on a patient who was at a skilled nursing facility. A Residential Home Care Specialist acted on the real-time information provided through the Ping and called the patient’s wife to obtain additional information. The Home Care Specialist learned that the patient had fallen and was in significant pain which resulted in a hospitalization and transfer to the skilled nursing facility. Residential educated the patient’s spouse on their specialized in-home nursing and therapy services that could help improve the patient’s strength and prevent future falls. The patient then notified the facility that Residential was her preferred home care provider which allowed Residential to send a Transitional Nurse Liaison to the facility immediately to help smooth the patient’s transition back home. As a result of the Pings notification, Residential was able to proactively reach out to the patient’s family, allowing home health services to start within 24 hours of the patient’s discharge from the facility.

Residential Healthcare Group, headquartered in Troy, Michigan, is a nationally recognized full continuum provider of home health, palliative and hospice services. Founded in 2001, Residential is affiliated with Graham Healthcare Group, and provides care to over twenty-five thousand patients across Michigan and Illinois annually.

Bamboo Health empowers healthcare organizations to improve behavioral and physical health outcomes through the most powerful care collaboration network with Real-Time Care Intelligence™. By providing real-time insights during pivotal care moments, clients are enabled to perform life-improving actions and deliver seamless, high-quality and cost-effective whole-person healthcare. From coast to coast, Bamboo Health partners with five of the six major pharmacy chains, 52 states and territories, 100% of the top 10 best hospitals and more than half of the country’s largest health plans to improve more than 1 billion patient encounters annually.