New System Eases Patient Discharge Process

Every day, millions of people are discharged after extended hospital stays, but matching these patients with appropriate care facilities can be arduous, often reliant on months-old, inaccurate data.

Now, a text message-based, hybrid computer-human system that regularly updates both patients’ and care facilities’ availability statuses, developed by a Cornell doctoral student, is smoothing that time-consuming process. The system was tested at a hospital in Hawaii for 14 months, beginning in early 2022, and helped place nearly 50 patients in care facilities.

In fact, the system worked so well, the hospital is still using 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,” said Vince Bartle, doctoral student in the field of information science at Cornell Tech and lead author of “Faster Information for Effective Long-Term Discharge: A Field Study in Adult Foster Care,” originally published in Proceedings of the Association of Computing Machinery on Human-Computer Interaction.

This research was led by Cornell doctoral student Vince Bartle with senior authors Prof. Nicola Dell and Prof. Nikhil Garg of the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute.