Samaritan Consolidates Hospice Referrals to Enhance Operational Effectiveness
Community
- Post-Acute, Hospice
- Samaritan
- Mount Laurel, NJ
- Lengthy intake to admission process
- Primary source for incoming referrals was via phone call
- Time consuming, manual process to upload patient data into system
- Cumbersome, inefficient process to coordinate the pending referral follow up tasks
- Referral Manager™
- More efficient referral intake to admission process
- Increase in electronic referrals received
- Decrease in volume of phone activities
- Reduced time to process referrals
- Productivity improvements amongst teams
- Improved referral to admission conversion rates
Samaritan Consolidates Hospice Referrals to Enhance Operational Effectiveness
Samaritan is a not-for-profit, non-sectarian, independent organization located in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey. Samaritan is the regional leader for hospice care, palliative (comfort) medicine, primary care at home, transitional support, grief support and counseling, end-of-life education, and advocacy.
Referrals play a pivotal role in the success of post-acute organizations, yet many hospice programs still rely on manual processes for managing referrals. This was the case for Samaritan. With an average of 400 to 500 hospice referrals per month, the burden of manual processing became overwhelming for Samaritan leading to inefficiencies and delays in processes. The reliance on manual activities not only slowed down their overall workflow but also contributed to the administrative burden on staff prompting the need for a digitized solution to streamline activities and integrate data from referral partners to the electronic health record (EHR) system.
The Referral Manager impact
Implementing Referral Manager has significantly streamlined referral process from intake to admission for Samaritan. Consolidating all referrals into a single digitized system has improved productivity for processing referrals by 64% and reduced the time from referral to admission by nearly three days.
Before using a digitized solution, staff spent around 20 minutes manually entering referral information, and now utilizing Referral Manager has reduced this activity to less than ten minutes.
- Susan Fisher, RN, Nurse Manager of On-Call and Team Manager, Samaritan
The dashboard capabilities within the solution enable easy assignment of pending referrals and follow-up tasks, establishing a more organized and consolidated workflow. With the workflow features for filters, task assignments and alerts, an organization gains a centralized process and view for reviewing and tracking referrals. By digitizing referral processes, organizations can achieve enhanced productivity and more efficient transitions of care.
The referral dashboard has really improved the quality of life for our staff. Before the pending referral follow-ups for our nurses was a very long, laborious process but now we can go into that dashboard and see all the referrals through setting filters on individual worklists and be able to assign referrals and tasks to staff. It's really, really helped us immensely and it also shows when the tasks are done.
- Susan Fisher
