Engaging with patients’ families is a core value of hospice care, making consistent and timely communication crucial to quality — perhaps even more so during a pandemic in which person-to-person contact is more limited. To facilitate this some providers are adopting new strategies and technologies.
Effective communication in many cases requires hospice staff to be in touch with family members multiple times daily, often with a number of different relatives or caregivers. While this level of contact is often essential, it can also be time consuming for employees who may be caring for several patients at a time.
Colorado-based Dignity Hospices has partnered with a tech platform, in this case Serenity Engage, to help streamline these processes without leaving families in the dark. This has allowed the hospice to build efficiencies into workflows generating an estimated $75,000 in savings annually, the company reported.
“Whether it’s social work, or the nurses, or sometimes even the CNAs, they’re reaching out to families one at a time, and sometimes each family has seven different people to speak with,” Tom Miller, director of finance and operations for Dignity Hospice, told Hospice News. “Sometimes [family members] don’t talk to one another. This has allowed us to essentially take what would have been five 30-minute conversations and condense that down into a 20-minute update.”
Families with a loved one in hospice frequently indicate that timely communication is one of their top concerns. About 80% of family caregiver respondents to a Sept. 2020 Citus Health survey indicated that they would select a hospice based on the providers’ ability to communicate in a timely fashion.
Timely communication can also impact the ratings that family’s give hospices in the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey, the Citus research found. More than 300 family caregivers responded to the survey.
Hospices have increasingly begun to adopt technology to build efficiency into their workflows, partly to help combat staff burnout and relieve labor pressures that have worsened during the pandemic. Dignity Hospice’s streamlined communications process saved staff one-to-three hours per week, according to Owner and Administrator Jenna Girton.
When Girton bought the business with her husband Roy in 2017, the company’s average daily census was near 40, according to Miller. Dignity saw close to 15% growth within the first year. At the close of 2021, the company was seeing nearly 120 patients per day.
With the census growth came geographic expansion, which in some cases resulted in larger caseloads or longer distances to travel between patients. This made efficient workflows and even more important consideration.
“It creates a level of fluidity when we’re updating a patient’s current status in our care with a family,” Girton said. “We’ve had these instances where you’ve got a son on the East Coast and a daughter on the West Coast, and then there’s maybe a sibling that’s here locally. When we get that update, they’re able to ask questions, and everyone can see those responses. It’s kind of immediate feedback.”
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