Discharge Without the Fax Machine
How Itirra's outstaffed engineering team powers AIDA, a care coordination platform that moves post-acute referrals off fax and into the EHR.
Results reported by AIDA Healthcare for MultiCare Health System (11.6%) and Confluence Health (10.17%, 1,306 hours, 86%).
When the bed is needed and the fax is busy
A patient is medically ready to leave the hospital, but not to go home. The next stop is a skilled nursing facility, a rehab center or an adult family home. The bed is needed. The family is waiting. And the case manager is on the phone, researching one post-acute provider after another, then faxing pages and pages of patient information to each of them.
This is still how discharge works in many hospitals. The clinical side runs on a modern EHR. The transition of care runs on fax, phone and spreadsheets. Every hour lost there can mean another hour in a bed the patient no longer needs.
Before
- Case manager researches post-acute providers by phone
- Patient information is faxed to each provider
- Answers come back by phone, one at a time
- The patient waits in a hospital bed
With AIDA
- Case manager opens AIDA inside the EHR
- Referral packets go to providers through APIs
- Every answer shows up on one dashboard
- The patient moves to the next level of care sooner
The problem AIDA set out to solve
AIDA Healthcare builds a care coordination platform for hospital discharge and post-acute placement. The idea was simple: a case manager should be able to find the right post-acute provider, send the referral and track the answer without leaving the EHR, and without printing or faxing anything.
To make that work, the product had to live inside the hospital's existing workflow, not next to it. One more login and one more screen is exactly what busy case managers skip.
AIDA needed engineers who could work with EHR integration from day one, without a long ramp-up. Itirra became AIDA's outstaffed engineering team.
A discharge app that lives inside the EHR
Itirra has powered AIDA's product engineering: the Epic-embedded app, FHIR integration, referral workflow and analytics dashboards. At its core is the AIDA Healthcare App, a HIPAA-compliant web application that runs embedded in Epic and connects to it through FHIR APIs.
Embedded in the EHR
With Single Sign-On, case managers open AIDA from inside the EHR. No separate login, no copy-paste of patient data.
File-less referral packets
Patient records move to post-acute providers through APIs as fully standardized referral packets. Nothing is uploaded or faxed, which means fewer errors and fewer back-and-forth calls.
Discharge Dashboard
Every referral in one view: sent, opened, accepted, booked. Case managers see the bottleneck before it turns into an extra day of stay.
Analytics for value-based care
Real-time dashboards track how fast in-network and out-of-network providers respond. Hospitals use this to build narrow networks and hold partners to benchmarks.
Standard APIs instead of a new interface every time
FHIR gave us a modern, lightweight way to read and write patient data with secure authorization, with less custom interface work behind each new hospital. For AIDA it meant a responsive web app that works inside the EHR, on desktop and mobile, with current patient information instead of yesterday's export.
What changed for hospitals and providers
AIDA Healthcare has published results from health systems running the platform.
MultiCare Health System
Washington · since 2019“Using AIDA allows case managers to do other things with their time that directly impacts reducing LOS.”Deena Hannen, MSN, RN, ACM, VP Case Management, MultiCare Health System
Confluence Health
North Central Washington · since 2020“We don't have to choose between efficiency and high-quality of care coordination. We get both!”Stacy Canada, RN, MSN, ACM, Director of Care Management & Utilization Review, Confluence Health
Cantex Continuing Care
Post-acute · Texas & LouisianaResults and quotes as published by AIDA Healthcare at aidahealthcare.com/case-studies.
The delay is in the handoff, not the care
Much of the time lost in discharge is not clinical. It is admin burden, sitting in the handoff between systems that were never designed to talk to each other. When the referral lives inside the EHR and the data moves through APIs, case managers can invest more time in direct patient care, and patients can leave the hospital sooner.
Building a product that has to live inside the EHR workflow?
Outstaffed teams work when they own the result, not just the tickets.
AIDA is one of many products we are proud to have helped build. Let's talk about yours.