5 overlooked opportunities most post-acute operators miss

At Cortex, our platform is known for generating opportunities for your post-acute organization. With over half a million patient interactions and nearly 5 million discrete patient responses, plus over 20 years of post-acute administrator experience on our side, we know opportunity may only knock once; it’s important not to dismiss them when you see them.

Here are 5 overlooked opportunities for post-acute operators:

1. Opportunity to celebrate employee anniversary

Staff turnover is a severe problem amongst post-acute providers. Often, nursing staff and care team members may feel unappreciated when an important date like an anniversary is missed or glossed over. An employee anniversary is an important milestone and opportunity to engage your staff and decrease the sense of stress and burn-out with just a quick word and a small gesture of appreciation.

2. Opportunity to get positive online reviews

Ever google your business to see how it’s perceived online? The result can be scary sometimes. The squeaky wheel most often gets the grease, and NEGATIVE reviews can be a real problem for even the most successful post-acute organizations. The only way to combat a skewed online reputation is to encourage your discharged patients with positive experiences to participate in providing their reviews and feedback. This is a time-sensitive opportunity, as the longer time passes, the less likely the patient will leave a glowing review.

3. Opportunity to reward employee performance

If you keep track of key performance indicators, you’re probably already monitoring your care team and staff’s day-to-day performance. And merit-based rewards like promotions or bonuses will go a long way. But are you also measuring performance based on patient interaction? A care team member going above and beyond to help ensure a pleasant stay for a patient should be a metric you track and reward accordingly, but don’t always show up on your measurable KPIs.

4. Opportunity to reacquire a patient

Do you know how often you lose a referral during a post-acute transition? 44% of the time. On average, only 37% of referrals become a patient at the destination post-acute referral partner. So when there’s an opportunity to reacquire an eligible patient, it is an opportunity an excellent post-acute provider should not overlook.

5. Opportunity to implement systemic operational improvements

As a former post-acute operator myself, I know all too well how many fires to put out daily. All too often, pulled in a thousand different directions, and when the opportunity presents itself to make some operational improvements, we don’t even hear it knocking. This is perhaps the most significant opportunity that gets away from most of us. Small functional changes, like communicating post-discharge medication instructions, improving therapy services, and improving communication with transition partners, are all opportunities most operators don’t realize they are missing.These and other operational opportunities are best identified with a system to gather feedback and alert options.

Identifying and acting timely on these opportunities will save you money, improve satisfaction, and increase staff engagement.

Are you getting and acting on these five overlooked opportunities?