HPM Seminar Series

Hospital-SNF Information Sharing: Discordance and Disruption

Dori Cross, PhD
Assistant Professor
Division of Health Policy & Management

Care transitions between hospitals and skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) are poorly coordinated, frustrating providers and compromising patient care quality and safety. Recent payment reforms incentivize efforts to address these challenges, encouraging hospitals to invest in improved information sharing and different types of care integration strategies that support handoff. However, hospitals invest differently in improved transitional care practices. SNFs, which maintain numerous hospital referral partners, may then experience challenging discordance and workflow disruption as a result of inconsistent practices across hospitals. Understanding this discordance is critical to shaping policy and health system guidance that better supports SNF needs. This research-in-progress seeks to characterize the variation SNFs experience in transitional care processes across their hospital partners, and how these differences affect perceptions of information continuity as a key component of coordinated care.

HPM Seminar Series is sponsored by the Division of Health Policy and Management. All are invited to attend.