In early 2023, a midwest 8 hospital regional of a national health system partnered with Rely Health to address a critical issue in emergency department care: the 70-90% of patients who leave the emergency department (ED) without any follow-up support or care navigation. Together, they developed and launched a robust patient care navigation program to enhance follow-up care and reduce readmissions.
The Health System and Rely Health established a Navigation Hub consisting of 13 navigators. Rely Health recruited, hired, trained and onboarded the navigation team according to the health systems specifications. This team was tasked with overseeing the care of over 200,000 lives across eight different emergency departments. The primary goal was to optimize support for the entire discharged population, drive new appointments, particularly within the systems Medical Group, and address value-based metrics like readmission rates by establishing patients with a primary care home.
With the system's previous approach they were able to offer navigation services to 1,177 patients monthly, resulting in 271 transitions and 90 appointments scheduled.
The partnership deployed Rely Health’s hybrid navigation program which consisted of Rely Health’s care navigators empowered with Rely’s proprietary technology stack. This included the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to scale patient outreach efforts, utilizing SMS texts and AI-driven phone calls to engage patients and guide them through their continuation of care. Rely Health’s AI driven technology stack addressed many issues that were burdening the health systems existing clinical and care management teams including: completing documentation and billing activities, ensuring VBC activities were captured and documented appropriately, appointment scheduling and reminders, follow-up check-ins and a myriad of other navigation-oriented tasks.
The program achieved significant improvements in patient outcomes by reducing avoidable ED revisits while establishing appropriate follow-up patient care with specialists, primary care, and community resources.
The success of this partnership can be attributed to the close collaboration of Rely Health and the individual hospital emergency departments and leadership to ensure that programs were designed to meet each hospital's specific needs. Additionally, the strategic design of the Navigation Hub and hybrid program structure, which combines a fully managed team of empathetic human navigators using AI to drive scale was key to engaging with the entire discharged patient population and driving impactful quality and value outcomes. By leveraging SMS texts and AI phone calls, Rely Health’s Navigation Hub effectively engaged patients, leading to better follow-up care and significant reductions in revisit rates. This partnership between the Mid-West Health System and Rely Health demonstrates the power of Rely Health’s hybrid approach to utilizing technology to support care navigators in transforming patient care and driving value-based outcomes.
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