Beyond a call center
In most cases, referring emergency departments initiate a patient transfer by calling the health system to which the patient is being referred. Busy clinicians who make these referrals need more than a call center; they need support from a highly trained team equipped with integrated, predictive and enterprise-wide analytic tools to guide physicians to the appropriate care location, whether that is a specialty center focused on trauma, heart and vascular, neurology, or a less specialized care venue.

To serve in this consultative role, agents serving in the transfer center would have the right composition of personalities, skill sets, roles and training. To effectively support physicians and other providers in emergent situations with high-acuity patients also means that additional training and assessing for interpersonal skills and a service-focused attitude is essential.

However, difficult transfers that require excessive waiting, callbacks, and unproductive consultations with physicians who cannot approve a transfer or admission can be a source of frustration, often causing referring physicians to choose a competitor. Transfer request decisions should not be made lightly, but the faster the health system can arrive at a “yes” to the transfer request, the happier the referring physician will be.

Likewise, during a difficult medical event, patients and their loved ones will remember that they or a family member received the care they needed quickly and smoothly. Conversely, they’ll remember — and share with anyone who will listen — a negative experience. The patient and family don’t care about all the complex calculations that go into a successful transfer. They only want a quick resolution and to come out of the experience feeling well-cared for.

Understanding true capacity and load balancing
Improving the speed of that resolution requires access to facility and physician data, as well as analytics that integrate actionable information from a multitude of disparate systems. Unfortunately, some healthcare organizations may only have a high-level overview of their main hospital, or data sets that are hosted on different applications, requiring switching back and forth between platforms, and multiple phone calls to verify information, all of which slow the time to definitive care. Instead, well-designed, easy-to-use dashboards would facilitate answering referring physicians’ questions faster and more accurately. Having the most up-to-date information about systemwide capacity and on-call physicians would also speed the time from first contact to appropriate care.

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