Improving Communication with Referral Sources and Family
Written By: RecoveryView.com Date: January 8th, 2012. Topic: Member Profile Article.
When your loved one is in a treatment center, getting clean and working toward his or her recovery, it is likely you are riding an emotional roller coaster. No doubt years of hurt, frustration and worry have led to the need for rehabilitation, so most family members are emotionally spent by this point anyway. So a certain amount of relief comes when you know your loved one is in trained and capable hands. Unfortunately, it is here that things tend to go awry. It is very common for family members to have a very difficult time connecting with the therapists or doctors caring for their family members, leaving them to wonder how they are faring and what it might be like for everyone upon discharge.
This is the scenario Craig Gordon encountered when his oldest son, Chris, became addicted to drugs in his teens. After several trips to the hospital for drug-related issues, Gordon knew he had to find his son a treatment center. With limited resources at his disposal, he found a center in Utah – a significant distance from their Phoenix home. Chris stayed a total of 10 months, and in that time, Gordon made the 12-hour roundtrip drive twice a month to meet with Chris’ treatment team and stay abreast of his progress. Sheer frustration about the lack of communication while he was home in Phoenix fueled this trek of love.
Once out of treatment, Chris thrived for a solid year. However, unbeknownst to Gordon and their family, Chris remained involved in drugs, eventually overdosing and dying in 2006. Shortly thereafter, Gordon went to his childhood home in Columbus, Ohio, to surround himself with his family and lifelong friends. It was then that he reconnected with Neil Moore, a friend since 1964.
Moore had worked for 24 years in health care on the Information Technology side of things, most recently in senior health care. “The communication families received from providers was poor to non-existent,” Moore recalls. “My personal experience with this was so unfulfilling that I thought, ‘I can fix this by using what I know’”.
Moore created the company’s first product, Connect for Healthcare™ with a very simple premise: To be a portal between family members and inpatient and outpatient treatment providers for status updates that are distributed to everyone simultaneously, via email or text. Initially, the system was directed toward senior health care, connecting families to their loved ones in nursing homes and the like.
When the childhood friends reconnected, it became clear that their respective experiences aligned their desires to improve the way inpatient facilities currently communicate. When Gordon came on to do business development, he had a strong desire to expand to serve drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities as well.
“Immediately after we began to delve into the addictions field, we had met with many consultants, who all thought we had a great idea, but needed to focus on communication with referral sources who don’t know what happened to the people they referred to treatment centers,” Gordon explained. “So we see our primary value now as not only informing the families about their family member’s status, but also keeping the referral sources up to date on the status of the referee.”
Connect for Healthcare for Behavioral Health™ makes the process as simple and user-friendly as possible. “Once you tap into the service, it is all automatic,” Gordon states. Treatment providers can customize the status criteria for each patient. To complete an update, they simply click on a spectrum of progress and add comments. The service automatically notifies the referral source and approved family members (as appropriate) that a new status update is available on the patient’s highly secure Web page. The entire process usually takes no more than five minutes, making it painless for the treatment provider and invaluable to those receiving the updates.
“Some providers also use the system as an easy way to organize all their patients and monitor their progress at a glance,” Gordon states. Though the circumstances that brought Connect for Healthcare™ to behavioral health are heartbreaking and frustrating, it is this very personal association that drives it forward, potentially saving other families from the same experience.
For a limited time, the company is offering a no-risk trial of the service to qualifying treatment centers. To learn more about Connect for Healthcare for Behavioral Health™, visit, www.connect4healthcare.com, or contact them directly at 480.251.8124, or craig@connect4healthcare.com.
Connect 4 Healthcare, LLC announced today that they have signed an agreement with Unity Health System of Rochester New York whereby the health system will implement the Connect for Healthcare™ service in all six of their adult day locations. “Unity’s Adult Day programs had more than 43,000 visits last year. We are especially pleased to be working with such an experienced and dedicated team on the introduction of our service into Adult Day Services environment.” said Neil Moore Founder and CEO of Connect 4 Healthcare, LLC.
