Discharge Call Manager Helps Hospitals Follow Up More Effectively

Gulf Breeze, Fla. (Dec. 6, 2007) – Studer Group today announced that its Discharge Call Manager software solution (DCM) has now been purchased by 100 hospitals around the country. DCM helps hospitals improve clinical outcomes and bottom-line results by ensuring that hospital staff follow up with patients after discharge and get quantifiable answers to specific questions.

DCM is a Web-based application that automates the framework of post-discharge calls by auto-populating patient lists, showing customized questions by area and automating results for tracking.

Prior to developing DCM, Studer Group founder Quint Studer examined evidence demonstrating that, among other things, hardwiring discharge calling into the culture of a hospital or health care practice reduced readmissions to the hospital within 72 hours, reduced Emergency Department returns within 24 hours and dramatically increased patient satisfaction with the hospital experience.

But Studer also found that most health care groups were inconsistent in making discharge calls, tracking the information from the calls and generating reports to share information from the calls.

So Studer called in Studer Group coach Joseph McCrory to work with him to develop a software, DCM, to solve these problems. McCrory oversees installation of the software at hospital sites, helps the hospitals determine which questions to ask and track, and aids the hospitals in aggregating outcomes based on the use of DCM.

DCM works by linking to a hospital's electronic medical records and auto-populating fields so that hospital staff can be alerted which patients to follow up with on which day (perhaps days one and three post-stay), and which questions to ask that patient.

"Questions to a patient being discharged from obstetrics and from heart surgery are obviously different," McCrory says. "We want hospital staff to have the correct, targeted questions in front of them so that they can gather the appropriate information from the patient. Sometimes the patients have questions regarding something they have forgotten or failed to ask. But even if they don't, they always care that someone called to check on them. That improves patient satisfaction for the hospital."

McCrory works with DCM-user facilities to frame questions based on the kind of outcomes the hospital is interested in tracking. "DCM gives hospitals a way to collect new types of information from patients, identify new trends, and even correlate patient responses to different areas of the hospital so that staff can be recognized and rewarded," notes McCrory.

In follow-up interviews with early adopters of the software – facilities ranging in size from 90 beds to 1,000 beds – response to DCM was very positive. Ninety-five percent believe that the application has been a good purchase for their hospitals and 91 percent believe that DCM is helping the hospital, departments or units hardwire discharge calls.

"When we talked to hospitals before and after they purchased the DCM software, across the board they said that the software made all aspects of discharge calling easier, and tracking results more effective," said McCrory.

Other outcomes from the Studer Group DCM follow-up interviews show:

"At Studer Group, we use evidence-based tools and tactics to drive clinical, operational and service outcomes," said Studer. "DCM has proven its worth, and the hospitals that use it are improving their operations. That's what it's all about."

About Studer Group
Studer Group is an outcome-focused health care firm, working with hundreds of organizations and with more than 75,000 registered users of its Web site. Studer Group is devoted to teaching evidence-based tools and processes that organizations can immediately use to create and sustain outcomes in clinical, operational and service excellence. Organizations see clear results in the areas of higher employee retention, greater patient satisfaction, healthier financials, increased market share and improvements in quality indicators. Studer Group has worked with hundreds of health care systems, hospitals and medical groups since the firm's inception in 1999, including five of the eight health care winners of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Quint Studer's first non-health care book, Results That Last (John Wiley & Son), has been listed on the Wall Street Journal best-seller list, and is currently in its third printing. www.studergroup.com