Enhancing Emergency Care Delivery for Post-Acute Patients

The emergency department (ED) often serves as the front door of the hospital, especially for patients transitioning from post-acute settings such as skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) and long-term care (LTC) facilities. Unfortunately, the lack of comprehensive patient histories during these transitions hampers the ability to provide high-quality, continuous care.

Research indicates that 33% of SNF patients face an avoidable ED visit within 30 days of admission.¹ When the most up-to-date patient information isn’t readily accessible within the electronic health record (EHR), emergency care teams are forced to make do with what they have. Incomplete or outdated data can lead to premature or inadequate diagnoses, avoidable tests, extended ED length of stay (LOS), and readmissions, thereby increasing healthcare costs and causing added stress to more vulnerable patients. We can offer a more comprehensive understanding of those post-acute care (PAC) patients.

PointClickCare’s integration of patient insights from PAC settings within the ED Optimization solution is transformative. This advancement ensures emergency care teams have immediate access to clinical insights when a patient arrives from a PAC facility. For EDs, enhanced data visibility fosters better care collaboration, leading to improved coordination and the prompt delivery of the most appropriate care.

Supporting Care Coordination

The exchange of data across various points of care –– including PAC and ED environments –– supports care coordination between acute and post-acute settings. The value of this data is its ability to deliver real-time insights to ED care teams, empowering them to make informed, data-driven decisions and understand the risks associated with this specific patient population. As the largest care collaboration network in North America, PointClickCare can connect EDs to the SNFs in their area, giving them the ability to retrieve chart-level data about patient PAC stays and recent discharges, leveraging a network of facilities across the U.S.  –– all without leaving their EHR.

Simplifying ED Workflows

ED Optimization provides a more complete picture of the patient through crucial patient encounter history summaries and notifications, including care insights, guidelines, and plans. Essential data for ED staff is readily available and integrated into the EHR. By mapping patient data to the health system’s ED track board, emergency care teams can quickly identify and access relevant records without leaving their EHR, enhancing triage efficiency and throughput.

Improving SNF to ED Transfers

Intelligent alerts deliver rapid insights about high-risk, high-need patients within seconds of their registration at an ED. These alerts encompass patient histories, including SNF admit dates, facility and practitioner details, diagnoses and care guidelines, as well as current medications. This additional SNF data provides another level of insight into the patient presenting in your ED, mitigating medical uncertainty, supporting swift clinical decisions at the point of care, and enabling informed discharge or admit decisions. This approach improves data sharing and reduces the workload for both SNF and ED teams.

The Importance of SNF Insights in Emergency Care

To improve the continuity of care and enable the accurate and swift delivery of emergency care, we must improve data visibility across all settings, including visibility into PAC environments. This means ensuring EDs have access to real-time data from SNFs. The integration of these insights into EHRs through ED Optimization represents a significant advancement in healthcare delivery. By facilitating data sharing across transitions of care, we support better care coordination and throughput. This enhancement of our ED Optimization solution stands as a testament to PointClickCare’s unwavering commitment to assisting EDs in the delivery of efficient, high-quality care for our most vulnerable patients.