Discharge Phone Calls (Patient Callbacks / Patient Follow-up) and Patient Satisfaction Solution

  • Dramatically improve your patient satisfaction scores
  • Promptly recognize a post-visit change in patient condition and minimize hospital re-admissions
  • Collect accurate and timely patient satisfaction data
  • Improve patient care, reduce complaints and lawsuits


EmEx-Contact Patient Callbacks

 
 

EmEx-Contact is a turnkey solution for your patient callback and satisfaction survey program. Our call center team, using our patient callback software at our secure call center, will contact your patients soon after discharge. Patient callbacks work well for emergency department patients, hospital inpatients, and outpatients. Alternatively, you may lease our discharge call software if you prefer to use your own staff. All scripting, questions, and dynamic responses are completely customizable to meet your needs. In addition, we collect patient satisfaction data and obtain specific feedback on the emergency department and/or hospital experience and physician, nurse, etc. performance. Any patient care or satisfaction issues are immediately forwarded to the individuals you designate, based on the criteria you select.

It takes significant time without interruptions to perform great discharge phone calls, so adding this responsibility to doctors and nurses that are actively working in the clinical area is unlikely to be successful. Economies of scale and a significant investment in technology allow us to provide our post-discharge calls at an affordable price. We can reduce the expense of internal patient callback programs and eliminate the hassle of hiring, training, and supervising staff (we also offer a software-only solution for hospitals that prefer to utilize their own internal staff with our value-added services). In addition, your hospital can enjoy a positive financial return on its investment with increasing patient visits due to improved patient satisfaction, less time-consuming patient complaints, less professional liability claims and costs, and improved results on pay-for-performance programs (HCAHPS, ED-CAHPS, readmissions).

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EmEx-Contact offers significant benefits for your hospital:

Acquire accurate and timely patient satisfaction feedback

Each patient contacted can be asked to rate their overall emergency department and/or inpatient hospital experience, the performance of their nurse and physician, and to provide specific comments. This information is aggregated, benchmarked, and made available in detailed reports. Specific reports can be viewed on the web for each individual physician and nurse. We also offer flexible email notifications to the individuals you designate (as well as the physician and nurse who saw the patient) for feedback on patient care and patient satisfaction. We can even send each physician and nurse a summary of the day’s post visit phone call results for all of the patients that they personally cared for.

Our discharge call patient satisfaction data offers increased accuracy compared to traditional mailed surveys, as our post visit phone surveys offer:

  • Much larger sample size (expect discharge phone call completion rates of two-thirds)
  • Short lag before patient contact (patients typically surveyed 1-2 days after discharge)
  • Eliminate selection bias (a non-representative minority usually mail back patient satisfaction surveys)

Improve patient care and decrease liability risk

Patient callbacks improve clinical care, as a patient whose condition is worsening is directed to return to the emergency department before a potential bad outcome occurs. Emergency Excellence can email or fax a report of the situation to the emergency department so that your staff is aware a patient was instructed to return. Patients with specific concerns or who do not understand discharge instructions are channeled to a designated person in your emergency department.

In addition, following any malpractice claim, if the patient was reached by a post visit call, the extracted data from the day after discharge will either (1) confirm patient was satisfied with the emergency department visit and/or hospital admission, had a stable or improved condition, and had a follow-up plan or (2) confirm that the patient was instructed to follow-up closely with their physician or return immediately return to the emergency department. Having this information clearly documented can eliminate or significantly reduce any payout.

 

Dramatically improve patient satisfaction scores

A patient receiving a post discharge call will appreciate the well-being check and the opportunity to give patient feedback on their experience. This goodwill reflects well on your hospital’s reputation. Several studies have shown the significant impact of patient callbacks for improving patient satisfaction scores.

Post visit calls are also useful for service recovery as concerns can be promptly addressed and issues resolved before they lead to more formal complaints or litigation.

A recent study in the Journal of Emergency Medicine noted that patients receiving a discharge phone call were more than 6 times more likely to provide the highest rating for “likelihood to recommend” than those who did not receive a discharge phone call. Click here to read it.

Improve quality and performance

Regularly engaging a large subset of your patients with patient callbacks allows your hospital to recognize what it is doing well and what needs improvement. This is why patient callbacks are a recommended best practice by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Click here to read it.

 
 

How is Emergency Excellence different from other emergency department consulting organizations?

• Our emergency room consultants include practicing emergency physician and nurse leaders with ER operations expertise
• EmEx-Compare, our benchmarking/survey service, is used to obtain a comprehensive pre-engagement review
• We specialize in emergency department performance improvement – unlike other firms, emergency care isn’t simply one of many service lines
• We are independently owned (other consultants may have recommendation biases related to their parent company)



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