Electronic Health Reporter

According to Florida Atlantic University’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, approximately 60 percent of senior care residents are sent to emergency rooms and 25 percent are admitted to hospitals each year. Although hospitalizations are required for a variety of reasons, experts suggest that up to 40 percent of readmissions, emergency room visits and observation stays could be avoided with better care setting transitions and enhanced care in the senior care home. This would not only improve resident quality of care but also eliminate billions of dollars in unnecessary health care expenditures placed on the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

PointClickCare, the leading cloud-based software provider for senior care, today introduced  two new embedded INTERACT (Interventions to Reduce Acute Care Transfers) tools for  its core EHR platform, NHHospital Transfers Rate Tracker  and eINTERACT QI Review of Hospital Transfers. PointClickCare offers theindustry’s only EHR platform that integrates these INTERACT tools within the clinical workflow of a software system through the eINTERACT initiative. As a result,  PointClickCare is helping senior care organizations  demonstrate to local hospitals and accountable care organizations (ACOs) how they can prevent costly and unnecessary patient readmissions. This is also instrumental in addressing the “Acuity Conundrum,” a term PointClickCare uses to highlight the challenges facing assisted living providers as they realign their organizations to support an increasing number of residents requiring more complex care.

“PointClickCare’s eINTERACT tools ensure that senior care organizations can provide critical tools to hospitals, helping to decrease the amount of time it takes to evaluate patients’ conditions. This ensures clinicians have greater insights into the care patients need, leading to better long-term care outcomes,” said Jill Shutes, ARNP, senior program coordinator, Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, Florida Atlantic University. “Hospitals are also able to effectively collaborate with senior care facilities to enhance early identification systems, and help detect and address conditions before they result in hospital admissions. Hospitals and senior care organizations are able to work together closely to improve the quality of life for elderly patients.”

The eINTERACT tools, which currently include integrated Stop and Watch™ alerts and automated Hospitalization Transfer Rate Tracking™, are designed to improve communication between senior care organizations and hospitals to promote positive resident outcomes during transitions of care. When transfers do occur, the new tools help providers analyze the episodes and determine if any could have been avoided. This information sets the foundation for clearly communicating information that is critical for the emergency room and other hospital staff to care for the resident.

The system also allows nursing staff to auto-populate as much data as available from the EHR, minimizing documentation time and risk for transcription error while improving efficiencies in time to transfer.

Established in 2012, eINTERACT is a joint initiative between PointClickCare and Florida Atlantic University (FAU), designed to bring the powerful quality improvement benefits of the INTERACT program to Electronic Health Record software platforms, resulting in a national standard to reduce unnecessary hospital readmissions amongst Long-Term and Post-Acute Care (LTPAC) providers. The tools enable providers to capture additional data during admission and/or transfer and analyze the data to track key indicators such as Admission Log, Hospital Rates, Transfer Log, and Trend Tracking. With these powerful admission and readmission statistics at their fingertips, that can be used for root cause analysis and gap identification.

“Healthcare reform efforts targeted at reducing readmissions are here to stay, especially in light of the introduction of significant penalties for preventable hospital readmissions. Residents in senior care facilities are also frequently subject to avoidable inpatient hospitalizations, which are costly, disruptive, disorienting, and often dangerous for frail elders and people with disabilities,” said Mike Wessinger, PointClickCare CEO. “Using a software platform with certified eINTERACT tools, we believe senior care providers will be able to play an ongoing integral role in helping acute hospital providers reduce preventable readmissions.”

Upon completion of the full eINTERACT specification, certification will be available to EHR platform vendors through an independent panel of industry stakeholders.

For more information on the eINTERACT initiative, visit http://www.einteract.info.

About PointClickCare

PointClickCare helps healthcare providers meet the challenges of senior care by enabling them to achieve the business results that matter – enriching the lives of their residents, improving financial and operational health, and mitigating risk. Recently recognized as the #1 long-term care software vendor by KLAS Research, PointClickCare’s cloud-based software platform takes a person-centered approach to managing senior care, connecting healthcare providers across the senior care continuum with easy to use, regulatory compliant solutions for improved resident outcomes, enhanced financial performance, and staff optimization. Over 9,000 skilled nursing and senior living facilities use PointClickCare today, making it the North American healthcare IT market leader for the senior care industry. For more information on PointClickCare’s ONC certified software solutions, please visit www.pointclickcare.com.