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Each day, thousands and thousands of persons are discharged after prolonged hospital stays, however matching these sufferers with acceptable care amenities might be arduous, usually reliant on months-old, inaccurate information.
Now, a textual content message-based, hybrid computer-human system that commonly updates each sufferers’ and care amenities’ availability statuses, developed by a Cornell doctoral scholar, is smoothing that time-consuming course of. The system was examined at a hospital in Hawaii for 14 months, starting in early 2022, and helped place almost 50 sufferers in care amenities.
Actually, the system labored so nicely, the hospital remains to be utilizing it.
“I worked closely with the people who had the problem, one on one, and not just, ‘Here’s a technology, maybe it’ll help you.’ It was a more tailored approach, and that helped us get off the ground faster,” mentioned Vince Bartle, doctoral scholar within the area of knowledge science at Cornell Tech and lead writer of “Faster Information for Effective Long-Term Discharge: A Field Study in Adult Foster Care,” initially printed in Proceedings of the Affiliation of Computing Equipment on Human-Pc Interplay.
The work received a Greatest Paper award on the ACM SIGCHI Convention on Pc-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2025), held Oct. 18–22 in Bergen, Norway. Bartle had one other paper on his system, concerning preferences and incentives for putting long-term sufferers, that obtained Impression recognition on the convention.
Senior authors are Nicola Dell, affiliate professor of knowledge science at Cornell Tech, the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers School of Computing and Data Science; and Nikhil Garg, assistant professor of operations analysis and knowledge engineering at Cornell Tech, the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute and Cornell Engineering.
The seeds of this undertaking had been planted in 2020, proper because the pandemic hit, when Bartle discovered of “a whole host of problems” at Queen’s Medical Heart in Oahu, together with inserting long-term-care sufferers following discharge from the hospital.
After receiving an opt-in message, every care facility obtained common survey messages, generated each 21 days, asking them to substantiate their emptiness standing and affected person preferences. Hospital workers dealt with responses from care amenities and coordinated the location of sufferers.
Earlier than Bartle’s system was deployed, the state of Hawaii would supply up to date data on care-home availability each 105 days, that means the information was usually out of date by the point hospital workers inquired. Shearer mentioned her staff used to make “cold call after cold call” to potential caregivers.
“We would often reach disconnected numbers or get no answer,” she mentioned. “Even when they connected, the match wasn’t always right for the patient. Everything was tracked by hand, which made the whole process slow and frustrating.”
After testing his system on a small set of care houses, Bartle deployed it in February 2022 to a complete of 1,047 houses that might be reached through textual content message.
Bartle’s system despatched out a complete of 16 surveys—greater than 37,000 particular person textual content messages—in the course of the take a look at interval. The hospital obtained greater than 8,000 complete responses, reaching a typical response price of between 35% and 44% for every survey.
Out of the 155 long-term-care sufferers the hospital obtained in the course of the survey interval, 127 had been discharged. Care coordinators confirmed that at the very least one-third of these had been positioned in houses that had been first contacted through Bartle’s system.
Bartle mentioned the response was higher than he anticipated.
“Every step of this has been, to some extent, surprising,” he mentioned. “We started by sending out 10 messages, and I thought, “I hope somebody responds’ and “What if they hate me?” However there’s a actual want, an actual drawback that is really occurring. And I believe that is contributed to how they interact with it.”
Garg praised Bartle’s years of labor creating and fine-tuning the platform.
“That Vince was able to form a relationship with the hospital, and then prototype, build and deploy this platform, is nothing short of incredible,” Garg mentioned. “Many academics hope to have this sort of impact once over their career, and Vince was able to do it as a graduate student by himself.”
Actually, Bartle mentioned, the hospital knowledgeable him that they now rely solely on his platform, and now not the state, for up to date affected person and facility data. The hospital is sponsoring the undertaking, Bartle mentioned, which is a significant cause for its continued success.
Stated Shearer, “Vince worked closely with our team to design a solution that actually fits the way we work. It’s a more efficient, more thoughtful approach that helps with patient and caregiver satisfaction, and staff morale.”
Extra data:
Vince Bartle et al, Quicker Data for Efficient Lengthy-Time period Discharge: A Discipline Examine in Grownup Foster Care, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Pc Interplay (2025). DOI: 10.1145/3710983
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New system eases patient-discharge course of (2025, October 23)
retrieved 23 October 2025
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