Re-Engineering the Hospital Discharge to Improve the Transition From Hospital to Home

Abstract

The hospital discharge is non-standardized and frequently marked with poor quality and is an important driver of healthcare costs. There is now ample evidence that improving communication at hospital discharge can prevent problems after hospital discharge including rehospitalization. The ReEngineered Discharge (RED) successfully delivers high quality transitions in care, improves patient satisfaction, achieves patient-centered outcomes, and reduces rehospitalization by over 20% while lowering healthcare costs. However, implementing these evidence-based processes into US hospitals requires smooth integration into customary hospital workflows, while not increasing health professional time needed to carry out these duties. Now, rapidly evolving health-information technology systems using conversational agents such as the MayaRED have great potential to deliver the benefits of RED, with the added benefits of saving nurses' and other health professionals' time, delivering post-discharge reinforcement of the care plan and connecting chronic care patients to remote patient monitoring platforms.