This year, we are excited to announce that H3IT, Home Healthcare and Hospice Information Technology Conference, will be co-located and held in partnership with the 2018 Annual Meeting and Exposition of the National Association for Home Care and Hospice (NAHC). NAHC has been a sponsor of H3IT for a number of years. In 2018, H3IT becomes a pre-conference of NAHC making it convenient to attend both events.
H3IT 2018 will be the fifth annual international conference for all stakeholders interested in innovative approaches to home healthcare, hospice, and information technology. Building upon the success of the first four years, the conference provides an authoritative forum where evidence-based findings, information, and tools are communicated to achieve better health outcomes, quality of care, utilization of and access to care, and reduced care costs in home and hospice care settings. H3IT's interdisciplinary and applied elements make the conference highly relevant to the patients, providers, payers, vendors, and governments.
Abstract: As home health referrals have increased, hospitals and healthcare systems have more financial incentives to improve patient outcomes in all sites of clinical care. The transition from hospital to home health is a critical time for patients as they adjust to living back at home while recovering from acute illness. Home health clinicians often have the most intensive interactions with patients in the early days after discharge. Yet, in prior work we have found that the communication between hospital and home health clinicians is deficient and that frequently home health clinicians are unable to reach clinicians. In addition, a recent study found that communication failures in which home health clinicians were unable to reach physicians were associated with an increased risk of hospital readmissions. With the increasing prevalence of electronic health records in clinical practice, multiple opportunities exist to link the care provided across clinical settings. Several innovative solutions and aspirations to leverage IT to improve communication after discharge from the hospital to home health will be discussed, including electronic access to hospital-based electronic health records, electronic messaging within electronic records across settings, and telehealth clinical interactions to connect home health clinicians and patients with clinicians in other settings.
Bio: Christine D. Jones, MD, MS is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus where she is the Director of Care Transitions and Director of Scholarship for the Division of Hospital Medicine. Dr. Jones graduated from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. She then attended Emory Medical School in Atlanta, Georgia and completed her internal medicine residency training, including a chief resident year, at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She also completed a Preventive Medicine Residency and a NRSA Primary Care Research fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Dr. Jones’ research is focused on improving care coordination between clinicians in different settings to improve outcomes for patients discharged with home health care. Her research is supported by a K08 career development award from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Her overall goal is to improve the quality of care transitions for hospitalized patients discharged to home health care.
