8 minute read
They'll Be There For You
BY DWAIN HEBDA | PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES MOORE
IN ANY HEALTHCARE ORGANIZATION, THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE VITAL TO OPERATIONS AND PROCESSES YET ARE LARGELY UNSEEN BY THE AVERAGE CUSTOMER. Such is the case with Baxter Regional’s Continuity of Care department.
Here, Sue Rodden, Continuity of Care Director, and her close-knit team of dedicated professionals, perform a range of back-office services for patients such as maintaining patient records and riding herd over insurance claims. They also connect outgoing patients to in-home nursing, long-term care or other resources in the community.
Empathy goes a long way here particularly serving patients with few financial resources or support options. Still, the team works tirelessly to improve each client’s quality of life, even though it rarely comes back to them by way of a thank you. Rodden said that just comes with the territory.
“Nobody ever says to one of our social workers or discharge planners, ‘Here’s a great case. Family’s great. They’re all intact, they’ve got money, they’ve got insurance and resources,’” Rodden said. “Many of these people don’t have any money, they may not have any family, it may be that the husband is demented and his wife is the caregiver.
Sue Rodden, Continuity of Care Director
Photo by Jason Masters
— Sue Rodden, MSN, RN, CCM, ACM
“The way my team stays engaged is we have great people. I hire team members who are sincere, who are well-intentioned, who are bright and who are kind.”
One of those individuals is Wendy Platt, BSN, RN, CCDS, Clinical Documentation Coordinator and a former bedside nurse whose career with Baxter Regional goes back 26 years, 21 of them with Continuity of Care.
Wendy Platt, BSN, RN, CCDS, Clinical Documentation Coordinator
Photo by James Moore
“One primary job of our department is to look at medical records and look at pretty much every department’s documentation,” she said. “We also look at what kind of diagnosis the physician is writing and if there are any gaps there. Medicare has guidelines of how specific you have to be on certain diagnoses. So, we look for any gaps and then prompt the physician.”
Other responsibilities for Platt and her team include utilization reviews, acting as an informational liaison with the patient’s insurance company by verifying the care a patient receives. The third component is to handle payment denials and disputes with Medicare and insurance companies. Despite the administrative nature of the work, Platt said her background in nursing is invaluable to the tasks at hand.
“You have to have that clinical piece, working with patients before you can actually go on this side of just seeing it on paper,” she said. “If you just were to come in and see it on paper, you wouldn’t be able to join all the dots like you could having had experience in surgery or the ICU. You’re just reading something and not actually understanding it.”
Platt’s multi-faceted skills collided in a big way a few years ago with the conversion of medical records to digital format, one of the biggest undertakings of her career. She said her nurse’s viewpoint melded with her back-office chops very handily in that process.
“When we actually transitioned from the paper records to the electronic records, I asked if I could be a super-user for our department,” she said. “I was able to help transition that, set the groundwork and build the actual product along with the clinical informatics team.”
Ashley Johnson, LCSW, a social worker at Baxter Regional speaks with a patient.
Photo by Jason Masters
The other side of the Continuity of Care house is patient-facing services, employees who meet with patients who are being discharged to determine the next steps in their care.
“We’re visiting with that patient, and ideally their family, face-to-face and identifying what they see their truest needs are,” said Misty Perry, a social worker who’s been with the Continuity of Care department for six of her 14 years with the hospital.
“We might identify a different need than what they recognize as their primary need. We’re assessing their home situation and their finances to see what might be available to them to make sure they have every opportunity to be successful once they leave our doors.”
Where appropriate, these additional resources could be physical therapy, a skilled nursing facility or other rehab center to help the patient recover from a procedure. Or it could also connect the patient or their family to memory units, in-home care or hospice, depending on the level of need.
Perry, who’s been in the social work field for 20 years overall, including nearly a decade in hospice care, finds great satisfaction in her work.
“The most rewarding part is when individuals succeed, and that looks different for everybody,” she said. “We come up with these great plans for individuals, but we have to make sure that it’s their plan. It’s our ethical responsibility to discuss all options available to them, and ultimately whatever the patient’s goal with care is, we make sure that it is honored.”
Perry said she joined Baxter Regional out of respect for the hospital’s caring culture, and nowhere is that better expressed than through the Friends Fund. That fund, fed by the Baxter Regional Employee Fund Drive, is available to assist patients with certain elements of care.
Misty Perry, BLSW, a social worker who’s been with the Continuity of Care department for six of her 14 years with the hospital.
Photo by James Moore
“The social workers are charged with being stewards of the Friends Fund, and we take it very seriously,” she said. “We are allotted approximately $15,000 a year to use in support of patients for things outside of what insurance covers. We have purchased tires for a mom whose baby was born prematurely and the steel belts were showing through. She couldn’t safely get to the hospital in Little Rock. We very commonly give gas cards to patients; we utilize it quite a bit in the ER for people that maybe have had a stroke and have to be transferred somewhere else. We use it pretty frequently for car seats as well.
“One interesting incident that comes to mind is a patient who took a motorcycle ride through the Ozarks. They totaled their vehicle, and no one in their family could come pick them up. We bought them bus tickets home.”
For Matt Baker, ADN, RN, a step-down nurse in Baxter Regional’s cardiac unit, contributing to the Friends Fund is a highly personal act. Three years ago, while attending nursing school, he experienced health complications and benefited from the fund to which he now chips in from every paycheck.
“I’d been diabetic for a couple years, and I hadn’t been to the doctor in a while. I was in nursing school, and I didn’t have any insurance,” he said. “I ended up being admitted to the hospital, and I had to be on an insulin drip for a few days.
“Misty and the care team helped me with getting insurance, getting set up with a doctor and they set me up with our diabetic education center to get a little bit more education. That’s specialized training; you don’t even learn most of that stuff in nursing school. They basically helped me get everything I needed so I could get through school and get my nursing license.”
Matt Baker, a step-down nurse in Baxter Regional’s cardiac unit.
Photo by Jason Masters
Graduating from North Arkansas College in 2019, Baker had no doubt where he wanted to launch his career, serving others at Baxter Regional in the same manner he was served. It’s a first-person perspective of compassion that drives him every day.
“It was pretty awe-inspiring. It gave me a lot of hope for the field I was going into to realize that there was that much help available for people,” he said. “There’s so much that Baxter Regional sets up for people outside of just direct hospital care. It’s one of those things you don’t really think about until you’re in that situation. It definitely gave me a deeper appreciation for what I was going into and a different perspective on just how far-reaching your actions can be in the field.”
