Need HH referal advice

[Kayeboss]

We are having problems getting referrals from the local community hospital. This hospital has a management contract with the facility that owns our homehealth agency but the community hospital does everything they can think of to avoid sending patients to us. Have doctors who want to specifically write for our agency but they tell them they will ignore the order because the patient has the right to choose their agency. Had one doctor whose office called our agency with a list of admitted hospital patients that the MD wanted the Hospital Coordinator to review for HH needs. Hospital Coordinator was told she could not review the charts. Discharge planners will pull charts out of the coordinators hands and write order for the for profit home health agency. We cannot get an answer as to why the act this way. Our outcomes are higher than any other agency. Our patient sat. is 98 percent. Anyone have an ideas.

[caliotter3]

Somebody with power has it in for your agency. The only advice I could offer would be to communicate to your doctors that they should instruct the patients to request your agency and to refuse to deal with any other agency. Like you said, the patient has the right to make their own choice. It is inconvenient for the patients, but they can get their requests honored and sooner or later the roadblocks will start to diminish. Have also heard of doctors that will only work with certain agencies and will not deal with the others. So there are two avenues of attack for this problem. The doctors and the patients. Good luck in turning this around.