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Cedars-Sinai to Patients: We'll Help You Get Settled

News  |  By HealthLeaders Media News  
   June 24, 2016

A transition program aims to reduce readmissions by arranging for or providing non-clinical services for recently discharged hospital patients.

It's an idea foreign to many hospitals and health systems. But over time, they've been getting used to the fact that their responsibility for a patient's health no longer stops at the hospital's front door following an acute episode discharge.

Many are finding that to effectively prevent readmissions, they need to recognize and react to the social determinants of health.


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Such a realization is behind Thursday's launch of the Safe Transitions Home program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Safe Transitions is a partnership between the 886-bed academic medical center and Santa Monica, CA-based HomeHero, a nonmedical home care provider.

HomeHero focuses on patients' non-medical needs, such as transportation to and from medical appointments, medication management, safety assessments of patients' home environments, and evaluations of patients' support systems, among other variables.

The company is empowered to improve those variables in an attempt to address the issues that can cause re-hospitalization.

Cedars-Sinai believes that such services improve the health of the patient generally and specifically prevent readmissions, for which hospitals and health systems are financially penalized.

Bradley T. Rosen, MD, director of Care Transitions and Complex Medical Management at Cedars-Sinai, in a press release, calls the company "a mature team with impressive individuals on both the healthcare and tech sides," who are "thinking creatively about how best to tackle fundamental challenges in patient care."

Caregivers from HomeHero provide comprehensive assistance with activities of daily living such as personal care, housekeeping and medication management.

The Safe Transition Home program covers additional services such as transportation to and from follow-up appointments with the patient's physicians. Caregivers also conduct guided safety checks in the home, record patient health information, monitor social determinants, and deliver critical real-time data back to families and case managers in the hospital.

Cedars-Sinai is among the investors in HomeHero.

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