Southlake Regional Health Centre Reduces Readmissions, Length of Stay, and ED visits for Knee Surgery Patients

Southlake Regional Health Centre (SRHC), a 500-bed hospital in Newmarket that serves both York Region & Simcoe County, has been at the forefront of innovative healthcare. 

With a relatively short length of stay and many same-day procedures in orthopedics, SRHC was looking for innovative ways to ensure safe transitions from hospital to home for its patients. 

Dr. Patrick Gamble, Head of Orthopedics, and Puneet Sandhu, Director of Surgical, Maternal & Paediatric Programs, spearheaded the implementation of a Digital Care Journey platform to elevate the patient experience and improve outcomes for patients undergoing knee replacement surgery.

With SeamlessMD, SRHC has been able to leverage technology to discharge patients sooner and enable safer transitions from hospital to home, achieving:

• ↓ 20% Avg. Length of Stay 
• ↓ 17.3% Readmissions 
• ↓ 21.6% ED visits

As Dr. Patrick Gamble shared: “Implementing SeamlessMD's Digital Care Journey for Orthopaedics has been transformative. The technology enables our team to provide real-time monitoring and tailors patient education for each patient. As a result, we've elevated the entire surgery experience for our patients, ensuring a smoother, more streamlined recovery journey that not only empowers patients to actively participate in their recovery, but also significantly improves outcomes.”

By providing access to a digital patient engagement solution that enables their patients to seamlessly navigate through their perioperative care journey, SRHC has also enhanced patient experience and education while reducing surgical anxiety - which furthers their goal of same-day surgery. 

Patient experience with SeamlessMD has also been terrific, including patients self-reporting:

• ✓ 97% of patients would recommend SeamlessMD
• ✓ 89% of felt SeamlessMD helped them feel more confident pre-procedure
• ✓ 91% of felt SeamlessMD helped them feel more confident post-procedure

SeamlessMD collaborated with a broad interdisciplinary team at SRHC customize protocols and content on the clinically-validated Digital Care Journey platform. Patients were engaged through the app-based virtual companion to guide them across their perioperative journey – via multimedia education, reminders, symptom tracking, and more. 

Meanwhile, care teams were able to remotely monitor recovery progress and patient compliance, digitally collect Patient Reported outcomes (PROs), automate self-care guidance via smart algorithms and workflows, receive alerts and monitor dashboards to intervene faster for at-risk patients, as well as provide personalized care recommendations to improve patient outcomes.

Read the full case study for more insights on how SRHC better engaged with their patients - even after leaving the hospital - while significantly improving patient education and clinical outcomes with Digital Care Journeys.