Kansas Department of Health and Environment Extends Partnership with Motient to Support Interfacility Patient Transfers for all Kansas Hospitals and Correctional Facilities
Web-based patient movement platform and support services coordinated 5,100 interfacility transfers for 115 state hospitals within the past year
Motient, a pioneer in patient movement solutions, has extended its partnership with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) and Kansas Department of Emergency Management (KDEM) to facilitate and track emergent interfacility transfers. All Kansas hospitals, along with the addition of state correctional facilities, will continue to be able to use Motient’s Mission Control solution to arrange appropriate patient transportation, source destination facilities, and analyze data to improve the patient transfer process.
“Motient’s assistance has been invaluable during the pandemic, and its 24/7 communications team has helped our communities weather the hospital capacity crisis,” said Ashley Goss, Acting Secretary, KDHE. “We’re excited to continue to provide free patient movement services not only for our state’s hospitals but also, for our correctional facilities, which face unique challenges. Aggregated state-wide metrics will continue to play an important role in supporting the health of Kansans through the pandemic and beyond.”
Interfacility transfers are a critical function of the healthcare system at large. Usually, they arise when the referring hospital does not have the specialized resources necessary to provide sufficient care for a critically ill patient. Instead of spending valuable time on the phone searching for an open bed or available transport services, hospitals rely on Motient’s platform and communication services to locate an available receiving facility and arrange transport services, as necessary.
In the past year, 115 Kansas hospitals used Motient’s Mission Control solution to transfer patients to more than 200 receiving hospitals across the state and beyond. The patient transfer solution coordinated transport services via more than 130 different vendors to complete a total of 5,100 interfacility transfers within 12 months. State-wide transport data helps Kansas assess transfer activity by area and specialty, determining data points such as where the highest volume of transfers originate, and which communities need additional resources.
“In terms of preventative healthcare and resource redeployment, the wealth of data that will come out of a statewide program like this will be invaluable in a few years,” said Dr. Alana Longwell, Chief Medical Officer at Newman Regional Hospital, a 25-bed critical access hospital in Lyon County, Kansas. “We started using the platform to find beds, and now we use it for more than 90% of our transfer patients. The platform lets us slice and dice our data around time-critical diagnoses to help us increase efficiency and improve our transport processes.”
Motient’s Mission Control solution is designed to streamline the transport decision and request workflow via patient acuity scoring and a comprehensive logistics and communication dashboard.
“We’re honored to continue our partnership with KDHE to serve hospitals and now correctional facilities across the state with relevant insights, actionable data, and enhanced workflows,” said Dallan Huff, president of Motient. “Kansas is providing a framework for public-private healthcare collaboration that other states can emulate. By prioritizing the needs of the frontline workers at healthcare facilities across the state, Kansas is helping to ensure the delivery of top-notch emergency services for every resident in need. We look forward to strengthening our partnership in the years to come.”