Reducing hospital readmission: Can Microsoft Dynamics CRM help hospitals meet new patient standards?

As a result of the US government's Hospital Readmission Reduction Program (HRRP), 2,600 US hospitals will have to cut readmission rates for Medicare beneficiaries with certain medical conditions including heart attacks, heart failure, and pneumonia.

If these hospitals don't meet these government mandates to keep their readmission rates low, they'll face significant financial penalties, said Timothy Pratt, Solution Design Consultant for the Health and Life Sciences at PowerObjects, in a recent webinar. And even though these hospitals are faced with these significant reimbursements reductions - some could lose hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars - few of them have implemented programs or processes to cut down on the rates of readmission.

One of the problems is that there aren't a lot of IT solutions available to address the demands of HRRP. And the ones that do exist mainly focus on predictive analytics to try and identify "at-risk" patients, Pratt said. Once they identify those patients, hospital employees often telephone them to check on how they're doing, which can be a time- and labor-intensive process.

Doing nothing isn't really an option, and Pratt believes that what hospitals need in addition to "at-risk" identification is a way to use technology to automatically enroll these targeted Medicare patients in follow-up care programs that give the patients and caregivers more ways to receive timely guidance from their healthcare providers while also giving the patient various ways to report back to assigned members of the hospital staff, taking some work off the shoulders of hospital workers, Pratt said.

That means hospitals need low-cost technology that will enable them to identify the patients who are at very high ...