Citus Health Blog

How Sangre de Cristo Community Care uses automation to boost satisfaction

Without an automated solution, hospice and home health providers require a lot of staff time scanning, copying, faxing, emailing and chasing down physicians for manual signatures. By implementing the Citus Health platform solution, Sangre de Cristo Community Care has replaced paper with digital forms and easy-to

-use app-less signature capabilities to virtually eliminate paper and gain substantial efficiencies for the organization, allowing clinical staff to focus less on administrative work and more on patient care.

The healthcare environment changed in a matter of weeks in 2020.  Now in 2021, we are living a new normal where remote patient support has become a critical aspect of home-based care and if implemented correctly can increase patient and family caregiver satisfaction, improve care team collaboration and drive organizational efficiency.

Innovation in communication to help the family caregiver

President & CEO Edo Banach of NHPCO sits down with Citus Health Co-Founder and CEO Melissa Kozak, RN, to discuss the importance of innovation in patient, caregiver, and provider communication.  Melissa and Edo discuss how easy and open communication democratizes health care “from Park Avenue to the park bench.”. 

As part of the Citus Health lunch & learn session at the NHPCO Leadership Conference in March 2021, we surveyed over 50 hospice leaders to understand the challenges their organizations face when communicating with family caregivers and IDG team members, the solutions they use to communicate, and how well their EMR connects with key clinical stakeholders in the care continuum.  We are sharing the survey results with you.

“There’s an app for that” is something we never heard before the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Today, we hear it all the time because innovators built small, purpose-built, apps that solve specific problems. Because not all users have the same problems, apps exist for different solutions. We don’t replace our phones every time we want to do something new, we just add an app, and our phones get new functionality – that’s the “App Store” innovation model.

For the past decade, hospice providers have been investing heavily in modernizing their clinical systems, care pathways and staff technologies. However, most hospice providers are falling short when it comes to what really matters to those who make the ultimate decision on choice of provider and serve up hospice satisfaction scores – the hospice consumer. Today’s hospice consumer is the family caregiver or POA, increasingly a tech savvy daughter or son of the hospice patient.

In 2020, we have reached an inflection point in care delivery.  Close collaboration in healthcare among all stakeholders -- internal clinical and non-clinical staff, referring physicians, external partners, and family caregivers -- has never been more important. 

We thought we would recap three of the most important themes that surfaced at NAHC FMC20. Telehealth was front and center with Bill Dombi, President of NAHC, citing it as the #1 advocacy priority in 2020.   What surprised us is a widespread call to look beyond telehealth to engage patients, physicians and clinicians like never before as the future of care delivery continues to take shape.