Why Assessments are Important
To best manage patient care, home health agencies can use assessment to understand patient populations and identify high-risk individuals throughout the episode of care. By sending assessments in between in-person and virtual visits, agency administrations can:
- Learn more about the patient and his/her home environment, especially if the patient is refusing or postponing care
- Understand the social and emotional well-being of the patient, especially if the patient is living alone and unable to receive visits from family members and friends
- Assess medication compliance, especially if a patient is unable to manage one’s condition and has recently been transferred from a care setting
How to Conduct Assessments with Telehealth
With Synzi’s virtual care platform, agencies can schedule and conduct patient assessments on a regular basis. Administrators can create and customize the assessments to reflect their clinical pathways and easily assign assessments to patients directly from the patient’s profile. The assessments can also query patient satisfaction with their care and feedback on the use of virtual visits and condition-specific messaging to augment the traditional in-person visits. A range of questions types (e.g., single choice, multiple choice, yes/no, rating, and text entry) also enables agencies to use the most appropriate survey design to obtain critical patient data.
As a result, agencies can:
- Gain insight into the patient’s progress and explore if the plan of care may need to be changed prior to the next visit
- Recognize if the patient’s condition begins to worsen and if an immediate intervention is needed
- Compare results across patient populations and identify opportunities to improve their delivery of care
- Keep referring physicians engaged with patient updates and improve the communication stream
How Assessments Can Improve Overall Outcomes
Assessments are extremely valuable during the COVID-19 pandemic. With Synzi’s telehealth app, agencies can ask patients to self-report symptoms and situations which may mean they are potentially at-risk. Based on the assessment’s results, a clinician can determine the next steps to managing the patient’s care and whether or not further testing may be needed for the patient and his/her family.
The interactive aspect of Synzi’s communication platform provides the patient with multiple opportunities to share patient progress as well as raise any potential concerns with the care prior to the patient completing the HHCAHPS survey. A virtual care platform that enables proactive assessments can help agencies achieve better outcomes for their patients, higher survey scores, and greater referrals vs. competitors.