Long-term care nurses enlisting BlackBerrys in fight for referrals

Hebrew SeniorLife, a long-term care facility for the elderly in Boston, is putting technology in the hands of field nurses to give them an edge as they drum up patient referrals from hospitals.

Hebrew SeniorLife has a corps of five nurses who serve as ‘‘clinical liaisons’’ in hospitals. Their job is to find and evaluate seriously ill patients who are about to be discharged from the hospital and win a referral to Hebrew SeniorLife for the next stage of their healthcare.

Starting last month, these field liaisons began carrying BlackBerry devices, with a wireless connection and software developed by Vettro Corp., of New York, that allows them to quickly transmit patient data directly to Hebrew SeniorLife’s admissions office.

That slashes the time to get approval for a patient transfer and should help them beat competitors, whose field nurses are still filling out screening and insurance paperwork and competing for time on hospital fax machines, said Joe Martini, admissions director and vice president of marketing and communications for Hex brew SeniorLife.

‘‘It’s a highly competitive business,’’ Martini said. ‘‘The person who gets the decision the quickest has the greatest chance of capturing that referral.’’

He said use of the Blackberrys has cut the admissions process from a few hours to half an hour.

Hebrew SeniorLife operates two medical units — a 31-bed long-term acute-care hospital and a 46-bed transitional care unit — where patients receive more intense care than they would in a nursing home bed, but less than in a regular hospital.

Such settings are popular in the long-term care industry, because Medicare and private insurance pay a larger percentage of the bills, whereas nursing home stays are paid by Medicaid at a lower rate.

These higher-intensity beds also provide a way for acute hospitals to free up space in their beds faster, because sicker patients can be moved into long-term care.

Competition for referrals is stiff in individual markets around the country, and Boston is no exception.

Michelle Niland, one of Hebrew SeniorLife’s field nurses, said hospitals typically give patients and their families a list of three competing nursing facilities that operate long-term acute care beds or a transitional care unit.

Each of the three facilities on the list also is notified that a patient is about to be discharged, so they can send a nurse screener to perform an evaluation and insurance check, typically performed on a 10-page form.

‘‘The delay is that you have to compile all of the information that you need, fax it over, and the fax machine is where the problem comes in — for the most part, two or three pages go through, and you have to keep calling and make sure they got it,’’ she said.

Now she fills out forms on her Blackberry screen and transmits them to the computers in the admissions office at Hebrew SeniorLife. ‘‘Any screener would be happy to get rid of the paper screen,’’ she said.

Fran Hinkley, Hebrew SeniorLife’s chief information officer, said the information from the Vettro system automatically becomes the foundation for the patient’s electronic medical record for the long-term stay.

Hebrew SeniorLife spent about $75,000 setting up the system, which Vettro hopes to market to other healthcare providers, he said.

Christopher Rowland can be reached at crowland@globe.com.