Vanderbilt University Hospital in Nashville, one of the leading academic medical centers of the mid-South and the flagship of Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has selected Allscripts Care Management's discharge planning solution to ensure continuity of care and improve the efficiency of the hospital patient discharge process.
 
Allscripts's Web-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution will connect Vanderbilt online with more than 90,000 post-acute care providers nationwide, enabling the hospital's staff to give patients the widest possible choice of facilities and home care agencies that meet their post-discharge needs. In place of the labor-intensive manual workflow and data management that discharge planning now requires at Vanderbilt, the Allscripts solution will automate the entire process from end to end, said officials.
 
"Allscripts Care Management will help us locate the best facilities that are available to our patients and provide those care facilities with complete information about the patient," said Ron Fortenberry, director of case/utilization management for Vanderbilt University Hospital. "This is a huge challenge because our population comes from such a wide geographical region and each patient has different needs and different payers. And by saving us time, Allscripts will enable our staff to be more proactive – instead of putting out fires, they can anticipate patients’ needs and provide better service."
 
During the patient’s hospital stay, the Allscripts Care Management solution gives Vanderbilt's case managers a snapshot of each patient’s post-acute care needs, enabling them to design the best discharge plan for that patient. Hospitals utilize Allscripts discharge planning solution to electronically identify an optimal post-acute discharge facility, often within minutes. This approach dramatically streamlines what has been an inefficient, costly and time-consuming paper and telephone based process.
 
Fortenberry added that the data management capabilities of the Allscripts system are also helpful. These include staff productivity reports and the ability to track the number of referrals to, and the number of patients accepted by, each post-acute facility. Moreover, Vanderbilt staff can now transmit referral notes and medical records to participating providers electronically rather than sending faxes that are often hard to read. Removing paper from the process has the potential to improve the quality of care and lessen the administrative burden of delivering care.
 
"It is more clear than ever before that care doesn’t end when a patient leaves the hospital, either from a quality of care or cost perspective, and leading hospitals like Vanderbilt University Hospital are focusing on creating a seamless transition to the facilities that provide the next level of care for many of their patients," said Glen Tullman, CEO of Allscripts. "By automating the discharge process, Allscripts helps to improve patient care while increasing efficiency and holding down costs at a time when every dollar counts for hospitals."