Hospital Readmissions Avoidance “Programs” — Vendors and Hospitals Not All On the Same Wavelength

Last week I attended and participated in an excellent conference — the National Reducing Hospital Readmissions Forum sponsored by World Research Group.

One of my main take aways is to observe a simple — yet huge — difference in mindset between hospital executives and vendors.

Over the past few months I’ve heard many vendors with diverse health care offerings talking about building readmission avoidance “programs” that they want to sell to hospitals.  Their idea here is to put together a soup-to-nuts offering of technologies and services — a “program” that hospitals would mostly outsource to a 3^rd  party vendor.

This concept has never quite sat right with me. Having spent the first 15 years of my career in and around the hospital world, I’ve often observed a “not-invented-here” aversion to anything brought in by outsiders.

My suspicions were confirmed at the conference.

The hospital mindset is NOT “we’re looking for an outsourced program from a vendor that will solve our readmissions problem.

While hospitals are in various stages of planning, here’s my sense of how hospitals have thought about readmissions:

We understand that avoiding unnecessary hospital readmissions is high on the radar screen of Medicare and other payers. We’re kind of miffed because we didn’t cause this problem in the first place, but we understand that the monkey is on our back to fix it.

The first thing we need to do is get together a cross-disciplinary committee within the hospital — and we should probably include some doctors. We need to assess at our existing internal processes around how we prepare patients to be discharged from the hospital. 

Would we consider buying a “readmissions avoidance program” from a vendor? Huh? …well we understand that we might not have all the right components or capabilities to put together every piece of a program, for example, a remote monitoring solution for patients once they leave the hospital…but we’ll get to that part later.