Serving communities across Wisconsin, North Shore at Home, an extension of North Shore Healthcare, offers hospice care focused on ensuring comfort and dignity. Grounded in compassion and respect, their services include spiritual and emotional support, grief counseling, personalized care plans, and more, all tailored to meet the unique needs of the patients and families they serve.
“Having CareXM, I can rest at ease knowing that calls are taken care of appropriately, and the person on the phone is being respected, and the call is being triaged and escalated to the right person if needed.” – Tammy Puccio, RN, BSN, Executive Director.
Challenge
As North Shore at Home opened their doors in 2021, they encountered the critical challenge of lacking a dedicated team to triage incoming patient calls. This created the risk of delayed responses to urgent patient needs, overwhelmed their nurses, and made it difficult to prioritize emergencies and routes for visits. To scale while providing quality, compassionate hospice care, they needed a solution for triaging calls both during the day and after hours, escalating only the most critical calls to their nurses and case managers.
“Having an agency to triage calls takes a lot of pressure off of nurses and helps prevent burnout in an industry where burnout is high to begin with.” – Cari Gmach, Clinical Director.
Solution
Recognizing the need for continuous support, North Shore at Home sought a partner capable of providing 24/7 clinical triage coverage, which led to their partnership with CareXM. CareXM’s team of experienced nurses became an extension of North Shore, efficiently managing patient calls and adhering to the custom protocols set by North Shore to ensure every patient call was handled effectively and in accordance with their care standards. This allowed for only the most urgent issues to be escalated to North Shore’s nurses.
North Shore also utilized CareXM’s mobile application, which gave them real-time visibility to team member availability and provided access to recorded call data. Both were instrumental in North Shore’s ability to ensure quality and maintain a high standard of care.
Results
By outsourcing triage to CareXM, North Shore provided immediate relief to their operations and staff while ensuring patient needs were addressed promptly and effectively. Due to the quality of triage and trust built between organizations, calls escalated to North Shore’s team were answered within the first attempt, further ensuring a reliable path to achieving full resolution of patient needs. Another notable metric of North Shore’s hospice operations is their impressive growth in census, doubling from 30 patients in August 2023 to 60 patients in August 2024. This significant increase highlights the efficiency of their operations and ability to scale.
