I wanted to share with you what I am being told by my teams, patients/families about Retirement Connection and CareAvailability.com.
As you know our time in the acute care hospital is limited by the pressures of progressing patients to transition to next level of care with an average length of stay of 4.5 days. This as you can imagine is very little time to meet and assess your patient, family, support systems, prior level of function, home support, medication and financial short comings etc.. Our team looks for every avenue available to make the work more fluid. We provide patients and families on campus the Retirement Connection booklets as they are well laid out and easy to navigate. We actually have folks who ASK US if we have a copy for reference while they sit in a room with their loved one. We love all the details you’ve added to the book at our request to ensure that we aren’t calling a facility that can’t meet the specific patient needs. WELL DONE!!!
When it’s not possible for them to be on campus or receive the tangible resource we direct them to your on line resource. We are so appreciative of your team’s creation of Care Availability.com as it allows us as a Regional Medical Center the ability to reach families who are often not within our community to provide them with this resource to view and select post-acute care options. They report the ease of use to research the appropriate level of care as well as your inclusion of Medicare.gov star ratings and finally they love any photos the facilities add to their listings to allow them the opportunity to visualize the facilities.
The one thing that EVERYONE….. not just my staff tell me every day…. Why can’t everyone update their availability? When they see weeks since last update they move on to the next facility. No one has the time to cold call every facility nor do they know that a Google search will provide them with as complete of a list as your booklet and online service provides.
Thank you for all you and your team do to assist case managers everywhere and most of all how your resources assist our patients/families. Because of your resources these folks can easily navigate what is often times a complex and unknown process.