Fix The Small Things
Lessons from Kodak and Yahoo: How Hospice Organizations Can Improve After-Hours Triage with Technology
In business, companies often face pressing internal challenges that consume their time, energy, and resources. Kodak and Yahoo offer two prime examples of companies that became so focused on long-term strategic issues that they neglected smaller, easily fixable problems, ultimately hurting their market position and brand perception. Hospice organizations today may find themselves in a similar position, addressing essential challenges like compliance, labor costs, recruitment & retention, Medicare changes, and merger activity, but overlooking smaller, fixable issues like after-hours triage.
Kodak’s Missed Opportunities
Kodak spent years transitioning from film to digital photography, a massive internal challenge for the company’s survival. During this process, it ignored smaller issues like improving customer service and digital camera design. These could have been easily addressed to keep customers satisfied and loyal while the company worked on its larger problems. By failing to improve these smaller areas, Kodak lost market share and weakened its brand reputation, accelerating its decline.
Yahoo’s Struggles
Similarly, Yahoo was focused on restructuring and battling competition from Google, neglecting simple user experience issues, like improving its cluttered homepage and upgrading its email service. Had Yahoo addressed these easily fixable, customer-facing frustrations, it could have kept users loyal while solving its long-term innovation challenges. Instead, Yahoo lost users to competitors, and its market position diminished.
The Hospice Industry’s Long-Term Challenges
Hospice organizations today face their own long-term, critical challenges. Compliance with ever-changing regulations, managing labor costs, recruiting and retaining staff, navigating Medicare requirements, and shifting to value-based care models are all essential to ensuring the survival and profitability of hospice organizations. These are complex, ongoing issues that require significant attention and resources. However, like Kodak and Yahoo, hospice organizations may be so focused on these large problems that they overlook smaller, easily fixable issues that directly impact patient and family satisfaction.
One key area that is often neglected is after-hours triage.
The Importance of After-Hours Triage
Patients and their families frequently express dissatisfaction with after-hours triage services in hospice care. Delays in nurse arrival times and a lack of communication about when the nurse will arrive can lead to frustration and anxiety. These experiences negatively affect CAHPS Family Survey scores, which are crucial in shaping the public perception of a hospice organization. When patients and families feel ignored or uninformed during critical moments, it can diminish their overall experience and trust in the organization.
Quick Fixes with Technology: Acurata’s Solution
The good news is that these after-hours triage issues can be addressed in house (no outsourcing) quickly and inexpensively with the right technology. Acurata, a company specializing in improving hospice triage, offers several tools that can help transform after-hours triage functions.
By leveraging Acurata’s automated systems, hospices can efficiently locate and assign visits to triage nurses, ensuring that they are dispatched in a timely manner, thereby reducing wait times. Acurata’s real-time scheduling technology enables hospice organizations to provide accurate nurse arrival times to families, reducing anxiety and improving communication. Patients and families no longer have to wait and wonder when help will arrive.
In addition, Acurata’s platform allows ongoing communication with families, providing updates via the patient facing APEx Patient Portal as the situation evolves. This improved communication builds trust and demonstrates that the hospice cares about the well-being of the patient and their loved ones, even during off-hours.
Implementing these technology-driven solutions can have a direct, positive impact on CAHPS scores, enhancing public perception and increasing patient satisfaction. Addressing these smaller issues—after-hours triage and communication—doesn’t require the same level of resources as long-term compliance or Medicare management. However, the improvements in patient and family experience can be significant, helping the organization maintain loyalty and trust while continuing to tackle the larger, long-term challenges they face.
Conclusion: Balancing Big Challenges with Small Fixes
Hospice organizations, much like Kodak and Yahoo, are often consumed by critical, long-term challenges. While these issues demand attention, it is crucial not to overlook smaller, easily fixable problems that can dramatically improve patient and family satisfaction. By focusing on after-hours triage and communication, hospices can quickly improve public perception and loyalty, buying time and goodwill while continuing to address larger operational challenges.
Acurata’s technology offers hospice organizations the opportunity to modernize their after-hours triage services efficiently and affordably, improving patient care and family communication without significant resource investment. Like Kodak and Yahoo, ignoring these small, easily fixable issues can have far-reaching negative consequences, but addressing them can lead to quick wins that improve satisfaction and trust in the long run.
Let’s Chat
For more info on how you can modernize your after-hours triage function using your own in house staff, visit us at https://www.acurata.us/, or contact us at hello@acurata.us. No pressure and no hard sell, just a chat about your current triage situation!