"Closing Care Gaps and Lowering Readmissions: The Grapefruit Health Advantage at New England Inpatient Specialists"

CHICAGO, Jan. 29, 2025 /PRNewswire/ --

Summary

Grapefruit Health has successfully launched its partnership with New England Inpatient Specialists (NEIS), a prominent Hospitalist group located in the Northeast. In this partnership, Grapefruit Health has been performing all post-discharge follow-ups for their patients. Over the last six months, thousands of these patient interactions have taken place and the partnership has been a success for all parties, with significant expansion plans imminent for H1 2025. As a result, readmissions are down by 13% and costly alternatives would have been 33% more than Grapefruit Health services.

The Challenge

With the U.S. healthcare system short over 3.2M workers, patients are often not receiving essential follow-up calls after discharge to ensure there are no immediate issues that could lead to a readmission. In fact only 20-25% of patients even receive these follow-ups mostly due to resource constraints (Source: AHRQ, "Care Transitions and Reducing Hospital Readmissions," 2015). 

NEIS identified the need for additional support in performing post-discharge follow-ups to ensure the highest patient satisfaction along with addressing any care escalations, thereby decreasing the likelihood of readmissions. However, the team did not have the in-house resources to stand up an outbound patient engagement function, the work was too complex for pure technological solutions, and offshore call centers are limited due to US regulations. After an extensive search, they decided to partner with Grapefruit Health - the decision attributed to their low cost, high scale, and high quality.

The Solution

Grapefruit Health was able to deploy its technology-enabled services in just four weeks. As part of the service, Patient Champions (clinical students) attempt to reach patients up to three times, beginning 48 hours after discharge. Once the patient is reached, the Patient Champions run through three questions related to the inpatient stay, covering prescriptions, discharge instructions, and home care services. If care escalations are identified as needed, these cases are immediately referred back to the NEIS discharging provider for resolution. If an escalation is more relevant for the patient's primary care provider (PCP), patients are referred back to their PCP and in some cases scheduled with their PCP, provided that Patient Champions have access to the PCP's scheduling system.

In addition, NEIS was interested in learning more about their patients' experiences. Grapefruit Health accommodated this at no additional cost so at the end of each interaction, patients are also asked about their satisfaction with the care they received during their inpatient stay. This is in the form of three Press Ganey survey questions which are used to calculate their MIPS.

Results

Within the first three full months, Grapefruit Health performed all post-discharge follow-ups as promised and exceeded the success metrics initially requested. In addition, NEIS gained valuable information on patient satisfaction and was able to avoid potential readmissions by handling formerly unknown escalations.

• 3 hours per day saved
• 13% reduction in readmission rates for Medicare lives
• More than 12 care essential gaps closed per week and hundreds of referrals back to PCPs
• 81% completion rate for answered calls with a 65% total reach rate
• 33% less expensive than utilizing a Registered Nurse

About NEIS

NEIS is a thriving, physician-led clinical enterprise with deep roots in New England and plans for future expansion. Founded in 2005 as a 6-physician program, NEIS has grown into a thriving, technology-driven operation that partners with seven hospitals and employs 90 full and part-time physicians and 30 nurse practitioners/PAs. Learn more at www.newenglandinpatientspecialists.com

About Grapefruit Health

Grapefruit Health is addressing the massive staffing shortage in healthcare by creating a national workforce exclusively composed of clinical students (i.e. nursing, social work, pharmacy, pre-med, etc.) that perform work remotely for healthcare organizations like NEIS. They support large healthcare organizations that are seeking support in closing gaps in care at scale and best-in-class quality through the use of retired clinicians who audit all of their work. To highlight just a few examples of the programs they run -

• Medication and vaccine adherence
• RPM enablement/Digital Health Literacy
• Get patients in for annual wellness visits/colonoscopies/mammograms
• Patient intake/enrollment/scheduling
• Health Risk Assessments and surveys
• Senior isolation/loneliness activities
• Post-discharge follow-up

Please reach out to [email protected] for more information.

SOURCE Grapefruit Health