Patient transfers are common, yet key, inflection points within a medical encounter—especially at smaller facilities. For example, rural hospitalist programs are often positioned as a stepping stone in a patient’s care journey, and a transfer seems inevitable. However, in some cases, keeping the patient at the rural facility is a better care experience.
Optimal patient transfer management impacts patient experience and outcomes. Whether a patient transfer occurs within the same facility or between two facilities, the goal remains the same: secure the best care for the patient in the timeliest manner.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the key benefits of optimizing transfer management within rural hospitalist programs, reveal indicators for when (and when not) to initiate an external transfer, and discuss how smaller hospitals can augment their operations to ensure strong transfers and expand local care.
Why should your rural hospitalist program focus on optimizing transfer management?
There are many reasons to optimize patient transfer management, but we’ll focus on the four most meaningful benefits to smaller, more remote hospitals and facilities.
- Expand access to specialized care: Rural hospitals often have limited resources and may lack certain specialized services or medical expertise. Transferring patients to larger, urban hospitals with advanced facilities and specialists allows them to receive the necessary care that might not be available locally. Effective management ensures timely transfers to appropriate facilities, maximizing access to specialized care for rural patients.
- Improve patient outcomes: Timely and appropriate patient transfers can significantly improve outcomes for individuals with complex or severe medical conditions. Rural hospitals may not have the capacity to provide the level of care needed for certain cases, such as major surgeries or critical care interventions. By facilitating transfers, rural hospitalist programs can ensure patients receive the right level of care promptly, leading to better outcomes and increased chances of recovery.
- Strengthen resource allocation: Beds, equipment, and healthcare professionals are often in high demand and low supply for rural and small hospitals. Managing patient transfers effectively helps strengthen resource allocation by ensuring that high-acuity patients are transferred to hospitals with appropriate resources, freeing up capacity in rural facilities. This way, rural hospitals can focus on providing care to patients whose conditions can be effectively managed locally.
- Prevent unnecessary costs: Managing patient transfers efficiently can have financial implications for both patients and healthcare organizations. Transferring patients to appropriate facilities can help prevent unnecessary costs associated with prolonged hospital stays or suboptimal care. Additionally, rural hospitals may benefit from partnerships or contractual agreements with larger hospitals, enabling them to secure better reimbursement rates for transferred patients.
How do you know when an external transfer is the right call?
Despite all these benefits of a strong transfer process, external moves are not always the right option for a patient. So, how do you decide when to relocate the patient outside your walls? Clinical professionals are well-trained to navigate these situations from a medical standpoint, but it’s important to invest in the tools and resources necessary to support good discernment.
One such tool is predictive analytics. In complex cases including sepsis, heart failure, pulmonary embolisms, diabetic ketoacidosis, and hyponatremia, the transfer decision can be especially difficult. Predictive analytics uses historical data, statistical modeling, and machine learning to find patterns and anticipate outcomes. While this technology will not make the choice itself, it can provide a clinician with useful information to augment their experience-based judgment and increase decision-making confidence.
Additionally, a detailed facility database can be an incredibly useful resource. Keep a well-organized knowledge bank of other facilities in the area and your history of transfers to them. This database should include details about each facility’s protocols, specialties, capabilities, technologies, EMR systems, main contacts, and key quality metrics. It should also be updated as transfers occur to record communication issues or tips, nuances discovered in other facilities’ operations or processes, and any other information that could help care teams make more informed transfer decisions.
What elements ensure a secure, streamlined transfer process?
If you choose to initiate an external transfer, many variables come into play that can affect the success of the process. While many of these are not in your control (unanticipated clinical changes or external facility issues), there are steps you can take to prepare and position your facility and teams to conduct a smooth transfer.
- Cultivate strong facility relationships: Effective patient transfers require close collaboration and coordination between hospitalist programs and receiving facilities. Work to establish clear pathways of communication, develop and test transition plans, and mutually evaluate continuity of care. By working to develop strong relationships with receiving hospitals, rural programs can ensure smooth transfers, accurate patient handoffs, and shared medical information—enhancing quality of care and outcomes.
- Foster transparency with patients: Always communicate clearly and compassionately with patients and caregivers throughout the transfer. Take the time to invite questions, explain decisions, alleviate concerns, and foster trust. A well-managed transfer can positively impact a patient’s attitude toward care, encounter satisfaction, and outcome.
- Consider all options: Maybe you have a specific facility you often transfer to, or maybe you are used to handling a certain condition in a certain way. While these patterns and habits can be useful in informing decisions, it is also important not to get into a rut. Ensure you consider each patient’s unique preferences, demographics, financial situation, and other factors to make the transfer process as seamless and effective as possible. For instance, insured patients may have more autonomy and resources to travel further away, opening additional options for treatments and facilities.
Facilities that partner with Aligned Providers Wyoming benefit from knowing our hospitalist programs are well-equipped to successfully handle patient transfer decisions and processes. We leverage deep operational experience and strong relationships throughout Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska to establish measurably better transfer management. In fact, one of our partner hospitals in Kimball, Nebraska realized massive improvements in efficiency, quickly reducing transfer time from 4 hours to <1 hour.
Why expand the scope of your hospitalist program?
Many smaller and more remote hospitals are prioritizing improving their ability to handle the most critical services for the community. Depending on the needs and trends within your population, you can determine what areas require the most focus.
Expanding or augmenting the services your patients most frequently or urgently need to remain safe in your hospital can allow them to remain stable, access more community resources, and stay closer to home. As a bonus, being able to effectively treat patients within your hospital secures your revenue stream by increasing trust in and utilization of your ED.
Facilities that partner with Aligned Providers Wyoming for hospitalist services gain remarkable support for endeavors to expand scope. First, our programs can keep sicker patients because we have a deep bench of backup staff. Second, our hospitalists have seamless access to expert consultations, equipping them with the insight necessary to handle more complex patients and situations. Finally, our leaders have decades of experience managing systems of all sizes, facilities in all location types, and patients of all acuities—and we use this experience to support and advance our partners’ most important initiatives.
Where to begin?
If you’re not sure where to start, welcome to the club! Small and rural facilities are under an immense amount of financial and regulatory pressure, so taking on new initiatives can be overwhelming. Our team at Aligned Providers Wyoming delivers tailored solutions to relieve burden and stress, allowing you to achieve your biggest, most audacious goals.