Purposeful. Have you ever wondered why this adjective precedes the word ‘rounding’? It would seem obvious for an organization to do their rounds with purpose, but you may be surprised that there are hospitals and providers that still struggle to streamline and implement rounding practices.
Purposeful rounding is essential to the patient experience. It is a proactive, systematic, evidence-based intervention to help you anticipate and address patient needs. Purposeful rounding should have an impact on patient quality of care, safety and the overall patient experience.
Consider this definition of the word ‘purposeful’:
useful and effective and working correctly
High-performing hospitals are the ones where their leadership, staff and rounding physicians are committed to a purposeful hospital rounding program.
Understanding the value of purposeful rounding to effectively streamline your internal processes is crucial. Purposeful rounding practices can bring an unmatched value to your practice or hospital.
Here are 5 ways you can streamline your patient hospital rounding through purposeful rounding.
Controlled Census Management
One of the key factors in purposeful rounding is an effective census management. Gain control of census management through a centralized database of patient names and locations. Ensure the database is accessible to everyone in your practice so that any changes that are made are reflected everywhere. Doing so will provide you with a firm grasp on census management and results in less time needed to communicate between staff and providers. Having the ability to assign responsible rounding for physicians and midlevel rounding provides an easy division of labor. The assigned primary physician who is responsible for the patient normally can notify them of the patient’s status. This helps with discharge planning and is a concise narrative of clinically relevant information to help seamlessly transfer care between responsible providers.
Charge Capture
Another way to ensure purposeful rounding is through charge capture. This useful and effective tool will identify and assign appropriate diagnoses and have that diagnosis remain assigned to the patient so it can be reused every single day. A charge capture allows you to easily identify and assign appropriate billing code and the summary of charges by any provider involved during the hospital stay. Now, you have the ability to quickly identify which patients have been seen or billed for and it is a safeguard to prevent missed charges and ultimately missed revenue. This encourages accountability between providers to enter charges in a timely fashion and accountability of the billers to make sure there are no gaps in charges during a patient’s hospital stay.
Clear Communication
Secure and clear messaging helps to notify you about new patients and provides crystal clear communication about them during their hospital stay. This clear communication is crucial to purposeful rounding. HybridChart makes it extraordinarily simple for the provider-to-provider and support staff-to-provider to communicate. You have the ability to easily resend messages, assign a priority to messages and collate them by patient or by sender.
Discharge Management
It’s critical to have an effective hospital discharge management workflow in your practice. With an intuitive discharge management system in place, you will be able to assign a disposition, who patients should follow up with and a timeframe when their follow ups should occur. You also have the ability to add any of your notes/comments/narrative pertaining to discharge. All of these things will ensure your patient gets the treatment then need and your scheduling staff will be able to easily participate in scheduling follow up visits.
Analytics
Documenting your rounds using a digital format allows you access to analytics. When all team members are able to view these important statistics, it encourages both teamwork and compliance.
Always remember that purposeful rounding is purposeful work. No more struggling—it’s time to implement streamlined purposeful rounding practices for success.
HybridChart’s focus has been exclusively on charge capture and billing with a customized approach specific to hospital purposeful rounding. Think HybridChart will help solve your purposeful rounding woes? Check out the HybridChart Story here to learn more!
- More About Dr. Sanders
Dr. Gregory Sanders is a Harvard-trained, practicing cardiologist and founder and CEO of HybridChart. He has been coding since the 1980s and has spent his medical career focusing on improving processes. His patient care skills earned him recognition as one of Phoenix Magazine’s TOP DOCs. He lives in Scottsdale with his family.