One of the biggest challenges that healthcare faces with heart failure patients is the high number of hospital readmissions that occur. These readmissions are expensive to healthcare organizations, a bad experience for patients, and many of them are completely avoidable. This is according to Spencer H. Kubo, MD, Chief Medical Officer at CareCognitics and Shahid Shah, Member, Board of Directors at CareCognitcs who sat down to talk with me about their innovative VIP reward solution that’s help heart failure patients avoid being readmitted to the hospital.
Dr. Kubo first shares with us a little bit about the challenge heart failure patients face with readmissions. Then, Shah shared details for how CareCognitics leveraged a digital patient engagement approach to reduce 30-day readmission rates. He describes that part of the solution is engaging with these patients on a regular cadence with personalized interactions that would be impossible for a clinician to do at scale.
Plus, Dr. Kubo describes how the solution interacts with the patient and asks them questions like if they’re considering going to the hospital which based on their response can trigger the CareCognitics solution to connect that patient with a clinician who can properly assess the health situation. Dr. Kubo describes a few examples where this simple engagement can avoid the patient readmission to the hospital while ensuring the patient gets the answers to their questions and concerns.
While engagement with the patient and escalation to a care provider is powerful, CareCognitics solution wouldn’t be as impactful without the rewards they have built into the solution. This includes rewards which activate the patient. For example, patients can earn a chance to win a cash prize based on their actions. The more they engage, the more chances they have to win. However, patients aren’t the only ones having their behavior incentivized by rewards. CareCognitics also rewards the clinic staff as a way to encourage them to sign patients up for the program. These front line staff are key to ensuring patients sign up and participate in the program. Rewards are a great way to motivate front line staff and are key to getting patients signed up for a program like this.
Finally, Dr. Kubo describes what it took to get the clinicians on board with this new program and what their response has been to the program’s results. Everyone in healthcare knows how valuable it is to reduce readmissions and how challenging it can be. That’s why it’s great to hear such a great reduction in hospital readmissions from CareCognitics efforts with heart failure patients.
Check out my video interview with Dr. Spencer Kubo and Shahid Shah from CareCognitics to learn more about the solution and how they’re leveraging rewards to reduce hospital readmissions. Be sure to also check out this VIP Care cardiology calculator to calculate the savings your organization could see. Plus, they talk about some of the directions they can go next.
Learn more about CareCognitics: https://carecognitics.com/
Learn more about VIP Care: https://www.vipcarehealth.com/
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John Lynn has been involved with CareCognitics since the start of the company.
