Medical Readiness for Discharge
Alberta Health Services (see Alternate Level of Care) considers a patient "medically ready" for discharge when the primary provider discipline (referred to as "medical" for simplicity) for an inpatient encounter has completed its clinical tasks and the patient is dischargeable from a "medical" perspective. Other needs (e.g., further mobility promotion, destination facility readiness, community home care readiness) may require more time to be spent in the current hospital. Accordingly, the expected discharge date may differ from the medical readiness date. Typically, a patient's level of care is changed from "Acute" to "Alternate Level of Care" once medically ready for discharge.
Connect Care provides discharge planning tools that can help record determinations about when a patient is medically ready for discharge. Planning for patients with relatively straightforward discharge needs can be facilitated with a simple medical readiness tool. Planning for older or more complex patients is best done with a multidisciplinary readiness tool. The latter facilitates tracking determinations for more than one collaborating healthcare discipline.
Simple Medical Readiness
The Expected Date of Discharge editing tool is enhanced (March 2025) to include a binary button ("Ready Now", "Not Yet Ready") that can be used to indicate whether a patient is medically ready for discharge. The date of determination is automatically recorded. The focus is on "medical readiness" (primary hospital service has completed tasks and patient would be dischargeable from that service, even though other disciplines may need to complete work to enable a safe discharge), as there are no tools for explicitly tracking nursing and allied health readiness.
Complex Medical Readiness
A multidisciplinary discharge readiness planning tool can be accessed from within the Rapid Rounds List (double-click on the Overall Readiness column "traffic light" symbol), Rapid Rounds Report (click on the "discharge readiness" section text) or inpatient chart sidebar transition plan (again, click on the "discharge readiness" section text).
A pop-up tool facilitates simultaneous management of multidisciplinary indicators of discharge readiness, expected discharge date (EDD), discharge destination and attainment of the target safe handling status. It also provides a space where teams can record discharge planning notes, which can be iteratively updated.