Sabrina Casucci's mother had two elderly relatives staying in hospitals at opposite ends of town. She had to split her time traveling to take care of both of them.
Her caretaker responsibilities did not end when the patients were finally discharged. Casucci's mother spent countless hours making post-hospital arrangements, like finding the right homecare agency.
Casucci feels her mother's experience is typical when navigating the discharge process. Often, hospital professionals, patients and caretakers share a common sense of frustration when dealing with a discharge system that is inefficient and time-consuming.
"We may be doing the right things in the hospital," said Casucci, a doctoral student. "But once we let [patients] go home, we're not really giving them the right tools to continue the recovery process."
Casucci worked to find a solution.
She and six other UB doctoral students came up with Discharge Roadmap, a mobile app they are creating to facilitate the discharge process to ensure continuity and quality of care after patients' hospital stay. With a simple touch of their smartphone screen, patients and caretakers are able to access critical information like health care assessment and post-hospital care needs. The app can also be used as a portal for making discharge plans, like evaluating homecare agencies and coordinating the caretaker's schedule to fit the patient's needs.
Although the software for the app has not yet been created, the idea has already won recognition in Hospital Quest, a global contest backed by General Electric (GE) and Ochsner Health System. GE is also collaborating with Kaggle, a firm specializing in data prediction competitions, to carry out the contests.
The competition requires participants to come up with ways to streamline hospital operations so patients and their families are not burdened by confusing logistics and hospitals could focus on providing patient care.
In the first round, the UB team beat 99 other contestants from around the world and won the $5,000 first prize for its app idea. It eventually took second place in the second round and the team won $20,000.
"I like the concept of the Discharge Roadmap and feel it is a place of great need," Warner Thomas told "No Free Hunch," the official blog of Kaggle. Thomas is the president and CEO of Ochsner Health System and a Hospital Quest judge.
Discharge Roadmap is important because it helps reduce chances of re-admission, according to Li Lin, a professor of industrial and systems engineering (ISE) and adviser for the team. Re-admission is "very costly" to stakeholders like hospitals and insurance companies, Lin said.
In 2004, the cost of unplanned re-admissions of Medicare patients was $14.4 billion, according to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
"Re-admission is completely unnecessary," Lin said. "If patients follow their discharge instructions ... they should not go back to the hospital, especially within 30 days."
The team behind Discharge Roadmap consists of ISE students Casucci, Dapeng Cao, Theresa Guarrera, David Lavergne, Nicolette McGeorge, Judith Tiferes Wang and Yuan Zhou. They worked on the app concept since last November until the contest closed in March.
"With the technology development, I think it's a trend to make everything electronic and more convenient," Zhou said. "So we think [Discharge Roadmap] a great idea."
So far, the team has no tangible plans to develop their prize-winning mobile app concept. However, Casucci said turning the Discharge Roadmap into an actual product is a possibility.
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