Care needs don’t stop between visits.

Common Questions

What is patient engagement in hospice? Patient engagement in hospice means maintaining meaningful, nurse-led contact with patients and families between scheduled visits – not waiting for them to call with a problem. IntellaTriage’s Patient Engagement service is a proactive, outbound program in which licensed nurses make scheduled calls to patients and caregivers, based on custom protocols tailored to each patient’s needs, disposition, and care plan. It’s the clinical presence that fills the gap between visits, catching problems early, reinforcing adherence to the care plan, and ensuring families never feel like they’re on their own.

What is IntellaTriage’s Patient Engagement service? IntellaTriage’s Patient Engagement service connects hospice patients and their families with licensed nurses outside of routine home visits.

• Agencies tell us which patients need to be engaged and when
• We build a tailored outreach schedule
• Our nurses review each patient’s EMR before every call
• We make contact

If a clinical issue surfaces, we triage it in real time and report back to the care team immediately. It’s a structured, nurse-led touchpoint program that runs alongside your existing care delivery without adding to your field nurses’ workload.

How is patient engagement different from after-hours triage? After-hours triage is reactive: a patient or caregiver calls with a problem and a nurse responds. Patient engagement is proactive: IntellaTriage nurses initiate the call on a scheduled basis to check in before a problem develops. The two services are complementary: triage ensures patients can reach a nurse when they need one, and patient engagement ensures nurses are reaching patients before they need to call. Together, they create a continuous clinical presence that neither service provides alone. IntellaTriage’s after-hours nurse triage service handles inbound calls when patients reach out; patient engagement handles proactive outreach between visits. The two work together.

What does a patient engagement call actually involve? Before every call, our nurses review the patient’s current records in your EMR, recent visit notes, medications, care plan, and any flags from prior contacts. The call itself covers the patient’s current status, symptom management, medication adherence, caregiver concerns, and any gaps between what the care plan calls for and what’s actually happening at home. If the nurse identifies a clinical issue, it’s triaged immediately. If a visit needs to be scheduled, that’s communicated to the care team in real time. Every call is documented directly in your EMR.

Which patients benefit most from proactive nurse engagement? High-risk patients benefit most: new admissions still orienting to their care plan, patients with recent symptom changes, those approaching a care transition, and caregivers managing complex medication regimens or equipment at home. In hospice, consistent engagement with high-risk patients helps ensure comfort goals are being met and families feel supported before they reach a crisis.

How does patient engagement improve hospice length of stay and reduce live discharges? Many hospice live discharges happen because families lose confidence: they feel unsupported, uncertain about what’s normal, or disconnected from the care team. Consistent nurse-led touchpoints between visits directly address that. When families hear regularly from a knowledgeable nurse, they feel held. They trust the care plan. They’re less likely to panic and call 911. Agencies that build proactive engagement into their model see improved length of stay and lower live discharge rates because families stay enrolled when they feel supported.

Can patient engagement improve CAHPS scores? Yes – directly. CAHPS for hospice measures ask families whether they received timely communication, whether the care team kept them informed, and whether they felt like active participants in care decisions. Proactive nurse outreach touches all three dimensions. Families who receive regular check-in calls from a nurse score those experiences differently than families who only hear from the agency when something goes wrong. Engagement programs are among the most reliable levers for improving communication-related CAHPS measures.

How does IntellaTriage document patient engagement calls? Our nurses document every engagement call directly in your EMR in real time. That means the field nurse arriving for the next scheduled visit already knows what the patient reported, what concerns were raised, and whether any clinical issues were identified or escalated. It closes the loop between the engagement call and the care team without anyone having to chase down information.

How does the patient engagement program get set up? Setup starts with understanding your protocols, which patient populations you want engaged, how frequently, and based on what criteria. IntellaTriage builds a tailored outreach schedule from there, integrates with your EMR, and assigns nurses who are trained on your agency’s specific protocols before the first call is made. Agencies don’t need to build new workflows or add staff. The program runs as an extension of your existing care team, with real-time reporting back to your clinicians whenever something clinically significant surfaces.