Home healthcare is all about communication, from your patients disclosing new symptoms to reading lab test results and discussing a case with another physician. Yet leaders often overlook poor communication in healthcare and a lack of home health communication tools as a source of operational drag — which has steep costs for agencies.
The Costs of Poor Communication
Poor communication has extensive downstream impacts on your home health or hospice agency, affecting your business and patients alike.
Financial Costs
A review of 23,000 medical malpractice lawsuits found that 7,000 cases happened because of poor communication in healthcare, causing $1.7 billion in legal and malpractice costs. That's just one potential financial cost of inadequate communication. For the individual practice, financial losses can come from missed billing, noncompliance errors, and poor use of staff resources.
For instance, in a recent survey, 73% of healthcare leaders reported that claims denials are increasing. Missing or incorrect information is a reason for 46% of these denials, which cost time and money in review, collections, or lost payments.
Operational Costs
Healthcare workflows and basic operations also depend on information sharing. Without good communication, staff may repeat tasks, mismanage patient transitions, and increase workloads, driving up operational healthcare costs.
For example, patient transitions are a major source of information breakdown, responsible for about 67% of communication failures. Without timely updates and disclosures, serious mistakes may occur, from medication errors and missed care to medical complications.
Patient Impact
Most importantly, communication breakdown affects your patients. Waiting for basic information about patient needs leads to longer wait times and delayed care, which affects patient outcomes, including readmission rates. Reports estimate that Medicare readmissions cost $26 billion annually, $17 billion of which could be avoided.
A lack of information sharing or information lost during transfer is generally considered a major factor in readmissions and suggests a low quality of care. Research shows that communication failures are responsible for nearly 2,000 avoidable deaths and 80% of serious medical errors.
These factors cause undue harm, reduce patient quality of life, and cause frustration and mistrust among families. This in turn damages your reputation and leads to even greater operational and financial losses.
How Communication Breakdowns Happen
Communication fails for many reasons, but the most notable involve outdated tools, lack of standardized data exchange, and gaps between care teams.
Outdated Tools
Technology changes the healthcare environment, ideally for the better. But tech changes fast, and outdated home health communication tools may not sync properly with newer digital tools.
You may not be able to receive or send documents through secure interfaces, which affects basic operations and updates. Outdated tools also open your systems up to weaknesses and security issues that could compromise your communications and business.
Poor Data Exchange Systems
A lack of standardized processes for sharing information and exchanging files is another significant problem, especially in patient transfers. This may involve health systems and home health or hospice agencies using different codes, medical jargon, or random data files. Without standard procedures, you may not be able to receive, share, or understand information, leading to confusion and misinformed decisions.
Gaps in Care Team Communications
Unclear or misaligned expectations between care teams can also lead to communication failures. Staff may have unclear roles and duties or lack the necessary training about what information to share and when. These gaps create roadblocks that interfere with care delivery.
Solutions to Improve Communication
The right tools, training, and protocols can help build a systematic communication approach that everyone can follow. Focus on real-time data sharing, standardized transition procedures, and staff training.
Invest in Real-Time Data-Sharing Tools
Record-keeping is a fundamental part of home healthcare. Investing in document management and care coordination tools with real-time updates and sharing across teams can simplify duties and enhance communication. Look for tools that feature healthcare AI and can learn from and predict trends and activities.
Create Clear Transition and Follow-Up Processes
Checklists and structured patient handoffs are essential in improving care transitions. One digital approach is to use healthcare automation to standardize the process using workflows: When X happens, Y automatically occurs, so every detail is accounted for.
For example, a healthcare AI tool with document management features can automatically scan files from a referral request, update the patient EHR, and alert you to missing files or information. You can quickly review missing information and onboard patients with fewer mistakes, better-coordinated intake and transition, and shorter wait times.
Offer Staff Training
Investing in staff training pays off in the long run. With better understanding of processes, staff can focus on documentation and patient care, reducing healthcare errors and improving care. In addition, training staff on how to better use tools and systems maximizes time and resources.
Enhance Team Connections with WorldView Solutions
Reducing agency costs and improving care can be as simple as addressing how you share information. Using new, advanced tools with automation and healthcare workflow features, standardizing handoffs, and training your staff can change your timelines, information accuracy, and overall care delivery.
WorldView’s all-in-one document hub offers custom smart workflows, referral AI, and real-time data sharing to enhance your agency’s processes. We've also kicked off our Stronger Together Bundle with our partners at Care Coordinations, Vivid Health, and SimiTree so you can gain deeper insights, keep families and patients updated, and improve outcomes.
Schedule a demo and discover WorldView in action.
