Streamlining Communication to Prevent Hospitalizations and Improve Patient Care

Preventing hospitalizations is one of our biggest goals, not only for practice purposes but just allowing patients to stay in their home and prevent further complications that can come with acute care. Communication is probably the biggest key to that, getting the appropriate information in a timely manner and getting interventions implemented timely and trying to get that feedback and take care of the patient. I can't even begin to put a number on the amount of time that we save. All that time goes back into the patients and into the practice so it has allowed us to significantly expand the number of patients that we're able to help. Yeah, one of the our favorite tools that we use in HUCU is a UTI SBAR. So it is a standardized tool to allow the nurse to communicate to us that the patient actually meets criteria for a UTI. So when they send us that form we can easily look at it, say this is the patient's vital signs, this is their symptoms, they qualify or they meet the criteria for a urinary tract infection and we can give them the order to get that UA and get it sent off to the lab very timely for us to treat that patient.