My name is Teresa Pinn-Kirkland, and I’m a nurse. I oversee the post-discharge team at Houston Methodist. So it’s a system-level team, and we respond to patients who have been discharged from all seven of our Houston Methodist hospitals.
How has your partnership with Artera evolved over the past few years?
So Artera was initially implemented on the physician organization side, and that was six years ago, for pretty much what everybody else was doing, you know, appointment reminders, scheduling – things like that. And in 2020, I’d say in September of 2020, there was an opportunity for Houston Methodist to work on a co-development with the post-discharge platform, and that’s how I got looped in. We were using a different one – it was like a robo-call, essentially, and everybody knows the pain points of that. So there have been so many different use cases and a lot of things that we’ve co-developed over the years.
So over the years we’ve rolled out multiple use cases, I know that a lot of work has gone into pre-visit preps, where patients can text in their Id or insurance card in advance. There’s lots of communication where, if they have questions and clarifications before they even show up for the day of, they can ask, and patients really feel a nice sense of relief and confidence showing up for things that they would otherwise be pretty nervous about.
What benefits have your patients and staff experienced since implementing Artera for post-discharge communication?
I think one of the unexpected benefits is the ability to have interdisciplinary coordination. It really helps when multiple practices are on Artera, you can @ mention across practices with enterprise users. It is a great way to have much more timely communication with patients, and to be able to provide feedback to our providers and to the different teams.
Previously our participation rate was probably 48 to 52%. With Artera, we have seen about a 66% on average patient participation rate. So it’s a lot higher.
What approach did you adopt for communicating with patients?
My team for post-discharge, basically is like the safety net. If you were discharged from any of our hospitals, from odds or inpatient, you’ll get an outreach. We’re trying to ensure that you transition home safely, that if you have any questions, care gaps or concerns that will impact your ability to transition home safely and successfully, that we can intervene or answer questions for you – and so a lot of times, they just need reassurance that you’re on the right road – 3 steps forward, 1, 2 steps back, you’re good. And a lot of times, that is our role. And so for my team, we on purpose have made it very conversational. It’s very personable. We’re trying to make sure they understand there is a live person behind there. Patients send in gifs and emojis. We text back emojis all the time. Patients really engage and appreciate knowing that it’s a real person on the other side who’s responding to them.
What outcomes has your organization experienced as a result of leveraging Artera for post-discharge communication?
Anecdotally, you know that there’s an ability to do service recovery, that you address questions, and you help patients know when they need to come back and when they don’t. Courtney Bruce, who is the Associate Chief Experience Officer, and I knew that we could look at the data and really quantify the difference in the impact that it was making. We had lots of patient feedback that they were really appreciative, and honestly, we were even surprised by the results. Like anecdotally, you know, it’ll be an improvement. It was surprising to see that there was a 3 to 7 point difference at the individual level hospitals for some of the domains and overall. As a system. There was an increase in 2.8% in the overall rating for the hospitals. Every domain that’s related to post discharge saw a significant improvement.
