Case Study: University of Pennsylvania

For the University of Pennsylvania Home Care team, known for their efforts in driving patient experience improvements, readmissions reduction is a primary focus. In order to further boost outcomes for their most complex patients, they chose CipherOutreach as a platform to improve engagement with patients who are enrolled in their services.

CHALLENGE

The Home Care team at the University of Pennsylvania wanted to provide improved engagement with a complex population of home health patients during their episode of care, especially over the weekends where field staff coverage was sparse. The agency’s goal was to reduce their avoidable rehospitalization rate.

SOLUTION

University of Pennsylvania partnered with CipherHealth in March 2015 to deploy automated calls with a select population of their patient census. With CipherOutreach, the agency automatically called the patients multiple times throughout their episode to ask questions and identify patients most at-risk of readmission, or those requiring additional engagement from their Home Care team. Patients indicating an issue were triaged to the proper home health staff member for prompt issue resolution.

RESULTS

Four months after implementing CipherOutreach, the readmission rate for the targeted population decreased by 16.3%. Overall, the University of Pennsylvania saw significant improvements in readmissions after deploying an efficient patient engagement solution.

CLIENT: University of Pennsylvania, PROFILE: Home Health Agency, PRODUCT: Episodic Outreach, PROGRAM: Home Visit Follow Up, DATA PERIOD: March 2015-March 2016