The HealthPartners Critical Access Hospitals in Western Wisconsin--Amery, Hudson and Westfields hospitals—can care for patients that are well enough to leave the hospital but still require additional rehab or nursing support as swing bed patients. The swing bed program offers many benefits to patients and their families such as care close to home, continuity of care from a provider and EHR standpoint, low nurse to patient ratios, and access to enhanced rehabilitation and other hospital services. It was identified that the swing bed program was an underutilized resource, with many inefficiencies in the referral workflows that created high variability and duplication of work. 

To increase utilization of the swing bed program, the team redesigned the swing bed referral review and acceptance process, developed new Epic tools for increased efficiency, centralized triage of the referrals and prior authorization, developed an enhanced skilled need definition to capture additional appropriate patients, and developed internal and external educational and marketing materials. 

Through these efforts, HealthPartners was able to grow their swing bed program, resulting in providing high-quality care close to home for additional patients. The swing bed optimization efforts led to a 77% increase in placement of internal swing bed referrals, 30% increase in swing bed census days, and a $2.2M increase (27%) in revenue from 2023-2024.