IntellaTriage Insights: Our Blog
Hospice and home health regulatory updates, market trends, and after-hours triage strategies.
We spent time with Ashley Calloway, IntellaTriage Director of Clinical Operations, exploring creative ways to fill after-hours scheduling without compromising care or nurse sanity. We know hospice and home health agencies struggle to fill those on-call shifts while keeping their nursing staff happy, engaged, and rested enough to best care for patients.
Several years into the pandemic and the ongoing staffing crisis, nurse burnout concerns still plague hospice and home health agencies. Their nursing staff continue to feel the pinch of heavy workloads and understaffing. Hospice and home health agencies must find a way to support fewer nurses with fewer resources. To help reduce burnout, agencies can outsource after-hours calls.
When it comes down to it, the main decider in how you choose between nurse-based triage and other after-hours models lies in the patient experience. A nurse-first after-hours triage provider connects your patients with a live caregiver at every encounter.
Over five months, utilizing the improved protocols, education, ongoing tracking, and monthly meetings with IntellaTriage, Coastal Hospice realized over 40% reduction of after-hours medication call volume.
Regardless of how your agency operates your internal after-hours triage, appropriately managing these calls requires skills that differ from bedside nursing. Consider these best practices if your agency manages your after-hours call internally.
Understanding the different options for after-hours care models and choosing the model that best fits your agency's goals can significantly impact overall patient satisfaction, nurse burnout, and your bottom line.
"We started looking at a triage outsourcing company and then talked to our staff nurses: "What would you think if we did this?" There was a resounding: Oh wow, you mean I can sleep at night?!"
Average Daily Census: 151 (at time of publication) Location: Bryan, Texas "Currently, our satisfaction scores for evenings and weekends are around 85%. When you look at the national data and the scores of our competitors in our market, we exceed both." - Martha Mozier, Vice President/Chief Operating Officer Challenge Hospice Brazos Valley initially started addressing [...]
Earlier this month, we discussed the impact of short-staffing shifts for healthcare workers. Splitting more patients between fewer nurses results in exhaustion, job dissatisfaction, and frustration: all the ingredients for premature career burnout. However, this isn’t the only consequence of having fewer nurses on the floor. These short-staffed shifts also jeopardize the health and safety [...]
Research shows that wages and benefits account for 56% of U.S. hospital costs – this far exceeds the other categories of expenditure, which include professional fees (11.9%), prescription drugs (6.7%), utilities (1.8%), liability insurance (1.2%), and other line items (22.4%). Since staffing is such a major expense, many healthcare organizations have begun to hire fewer nurses [...]
On the IntellaTriage blog, we’ve explained exactly how detrimental nurse burnout can be to your organization and your team. When staff members are pushed to the limit, they begin to feel stressed, anxious, and fatigued. This often results in issues with nurse retention and recruitment, with the average cost of turnover per employee reaching up to $58,400. Today, we’d [...]
We’ve previously discussed the impact that burnout can have on men and women in the health care field. Today, we want to talk about a principal factor behind that stress and exhaustion: compassion fatigue. What is this phenomenon, and how can employers protect their staff from nursing burnout? Emotional Exhaustion in the Nursing Profession The health care [...]