“There’s a surplus of stay-at-home nurses and a huge need to know what patients are doing after they are discharged.”
If I told you this was an article about a call center, here is the likely chain of events that would immediately follow:
- Struggling under the immense, crushing weight of boredom, you decide that the only respite from this madness is inflicting enough pain upon your brain to forget any and all words relating to call centers.
- Choosing this course of action, you repeatedly bang your head against any and all hard surfaces until, indeed, you can’t remember the subject of the article you were reading.
- Unfortunately, this means you are now rushed to the hospital and treated for blunt force trauma. After the doctor determines you are just a moron who bashed their own head against a desk, you are treated for your injuries and released (with a healthy dose of meds) back into the wild.
- Over the next few months, you are periodically readmitted into the hospital for a variety of ailments related to head trauma, solved by doctors as they occur. Your main wish — besides the ability to time travel and warn the world about reading any call center articles — is to find a way to address this readmission problem, giving healthcare organizations the tools to more effectively monitor patients who have been discharged.
Luckily for you, I’m not here to write about a call center. I am here to write about what happens when you address the patient readmission problem through a platform that blends call center software with healthcare analytics, cutting down on unnecessary readmission and boosting patient satisfaction.
I’m here to write about CheckUp.
“There’s a surplus of stay-at-home nurses and a huge need to know what patients are doing after they are discharged,” said Riley Adamson, founder of CheckUp. “I thought it would be interesting if we built a model where nurses can work on their own time, log in and make calls, then log some information that is sent back to their healthcare provider.”
CheckUp began with a small pilot program with a skilled nursing facility in Orem, giving stay-at-home nurses the software needed for follow-up call management/fulfillment. This was successful and helped Adamson drum up enough interest in CheckUp to begin onboarding customers, with only one problem: he needed a platform that could scale. This in turn led to the software development firm Izeni, who has helped him flush out the current vision of CheckUp.
“Essentially, we’ve totally rebuilt the system — it’s scalable, has more features, and actually works how it’s supposed to,” said Adamson.
How it works is simple. Within the platform, discharged patients are listed in a queue alongside all of their relevant health information. Stay-at-home nurses login and see who to call, what to ask, and that new information is relayed to the necessary parties. Healthcare facilities get the information they need, stay-at-home nurses get the help they desire, and discharged patients get the care they deserve.
“You have a question, a specific response, and a comment all tied together to a patient at a specific time,” said Adamson. “We’re providing instant feedback in real time about individual patients and their outcomes, but also how are they doing overall over the past year, the past six months, the past week. That’s part of what makes CheckUp very valuable.”
So far, CheckUp has partnered with a variety of home health agencies and skilled nursing facilities, and has begun conversations with hospitals to adopt their software. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive — one customer saw their patient satisfaction jump to a 100% star rating — and Adamson is convinced that CheckUp can address a very specific need in the healthcare industry.
“Everyone who has used it has basically asked, ‘Can we use it more? Can we add more calls? Can we call a wider demographic? Can we use this with our sister company? Can we share these results?’ There are so many ways they are wanting to use it,” said Adamson. “They love it and can’t get enough of it.”
CheckUp is beginning to carve out a small niche in the healthcare world, but the vision for what CheckUp can be is only getting started. By already accumulating a wide variety of data on healthcare patients, CheckUp is setting itself up for a potential jump into the world of predictive analytics. Who knows what the future holds…
“As crazy as it sounds, it’s really, really difficult to know patient outcomes,” said Adamson. “Did this person get better? Did they not? They only thing hospitals know is a binary did they come back or not. If they did come back to the hospital, they might know more information. But for those that are successful, they don’t really know how successful they actually were. We know that, we know what happens to people after they discharge. The people that we’re partnered with know all of the information about what their treatment was, what doctor they saw, what diagnoses they had, what preexisting conditions they had, and we can look for statistically relevant correlations between those data sets and do predictive analytics. We could potentially know, this person came to the hospital with these conditions and was discharged to home, we expect with 98% accuracy that they are going to come back unless some intervention happens.”
