Benefits for Private Hospitals

A HIPAA-compliant patient cross-referral and scheduling system, our CHConnect solution helps hospital emergency departments (EDs) reduce non-urgent patient caseload, resulting in cost savings of anywhere between $420,000 and $2.1 million a year.


Current Problem 

• Patient visits at EDs have risen every year. From 1997 to 2002, 97 million ED visits surged to nearly 114 million visits annually, while the number of hospital EDs decreased from 4,270 to 4,037.
  
  
• Nearly half of hospitals have reported that they were at or over capacity. ED waiting times have increased by 33%. About 40% of hospitals reported that they had diverted emergency patients to other presumably less crowded facilities.
  
  
• Ironically, anywhere between 10 and 50% of all ED visits are for non-urgent and avoidable conditions, and the medically underserved are more likely to make such visits.
  
  
• Routine care facilities are a viable means to alleviating the ED problem as they have been able to reduce unnecessary ED visits due to improved access to continuous, primary care -- leading to decreased hospitalizations.
  
  
• Unfortunately EDs' patient registration systems generally do not communicate with their clinic patient registration systems. As a result, the different systems operating within a hospital system inadvertently have allowed patients to use their EDs for non-urgent services without their knowledge. Those non-urgent cases could have been serviced at their clinic facilities instead -- at a less cost and for a more efficient use of their ED resources

Our Solution

• Our CHConnect solution provides a central information portal for a healthcare organization of EDs, primary care and specialty clinics. Through the website, clinicians from the organization's different facilities are able to share and view patient demographic and diagnostic information, make referrals to other affiliated facilities and track the patients through the case management tool.
  
  
• Through the HIPAA-compliant CHConnect, hospital ED staff would know who the patients are and schedule timely appointments for them at appropriate clinics/departments for non-urgent conditions or for follow-up care.
  
  
• According to the National Association of Community Health Centers, redirecting non-urgent ED visits to more appropriate settings, such as primary care sites, could save in excess of $148.67 a visit, or anywhere between $420,000 and $2.1 million a year per ED -- depending on the proportion of the ED visits that are non-urgent.
  
  
• Also, by freeing up ED resources, EDs would be able to take on more higher-revenue emergency caseloads.
  
  
• And no changes are required of your existing IT systems.

Contact Us

We will discuss CHConnect with you, understand your community healthcare needs and verify that CHConnect will indeed help your community and that your organization will achieve ROI for using CHConnect. Contact us now.