Communication With Our Hospital Partners: A Vital Pursuit

For the first several decades of my practice in post-acute and long-term care, it was a constant battle to get information or cooperation from our local hospitals. For all the wonderful, life-saving treatments they provided to our mutual patients, they seemed to have little interest in communicating with skilled nursing facilities to promote smooth, safe transitions of care. We’d get a sick post-acute patient with 40 pages of paperwork, most of it irrelevant — reams of therapy notes, cardiac monitor tracings, a seemingly random medley of records — plus, if we were lucky, the history and physical that had been done five days earlier.