Brant Community Healthcare System Increases Same-Day Surgeries for Hip and Knee Replacement with Digital Care Journeys

Brant Community Healthcare System (BCHS), a primary acute care facility serving 150,700 residents in Brantford, the County of Brant, Six Nations of the Grand River, Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, and surrounding communities, partnered with SeamlessMD to launch a surgical remote monitoring platform to increase same day surgery, enhance patient experience, improve clinical outcomes, and enable safer transitions from hospital to home for its patient populations.

With a vision to reduce surgery wait times and increase same-day surgery, in 2021 BCHS partnered with SeamlessMD, a leading Digital Care Journey solution, to launch a surgical remote monitoring platform to support patients undergoing hip, knee and/or shoulder surgery.

With SeamlessMD, BCHS has been able to leverage technology to discharge patients sooner, increase surgical throughput and enable safer transitions from hospital to home. For hip and knee surgery, BCHS achieved:

• ↑ 2300% same-day surgeries 
• ↓ 12% average length of stay (in-patient cases)
• ↓ 5% 30-day readmissions
• ↓ 51% average readmission length of stay

As Caralee Bolton, Orthopaedic Arthroplasty & Sports Med Sr. Resource Nurse at BCHS, shared: “SeamlessMD acts as a safety net for us to discharge patients home the same day as their surgery with the ability to remote monitor them and for patients to self-report their symptoms directly back to our care teams... For those patients requiring a traditional hospital stay we’ve been able to discharge them sooner, reducing their hospital stay, in turn enabling us to free up inpatient beds and increase our surgery capacity.”

By providing access to a digital patient engagement solution that enables their patients to seamlessly navigate through their perioperative care journey, BCHS has also enhanced patient experience and education while reducing surgical anxiety - which furthers their goal of same-day surgery.

Patient experience with SeamlessMD has also been terrific, including patients self-reporting:

• ✓ 85% of patients would recommend SeamlessMD
• ✓ 86% of felt SeamlessMD helped them feel more confident pre-procedure
• ✓ 79% of felt SeamlessMD helped them feel more confident post-procedure

“Throughout a patient’s surgical journey, they are given verbal instructions and paper booklets which are easily forgotten and misplaced... With SeamlessMD, patients have digital access to this information and more on their own smart device and/or computer, leading to improved compliance and fewer post-surgical complications. SeamlessMD provides an effective alternative to in-person care that helps us optimize the patient experience, increase operational efficiencies, and improve outcomes,” shared Allison Mcdonald, Pre-op Clinic Nurse at BCHS.

SeamlessMD collaborated with a broad interdisciplinary team at BCHS customize protocols and content on the clinically-validated Digital Care Journey platform. Patients were engaged through the app-based virtual companion to guide them across their perioperative journey – via multimedia education, reminders, symptom tracking, and more.

Meanwhile, care teams were able to remotely monitor recovery progress and patient compliance, digitally collect Patient Reported outcomes (PROs), automate self-care guidance via smart algorithms and workflows, receive alerts and monitor dashboards to intervene faster for at-risk patients, as well as provide personalized care recommendations to improve patient outcomes.

Read the full case study for more insights on how BCHS better engaged with their patients - even after leaving the hospital - while significantly improving patient education and clinical outcomes with Digital Care Journeys.