This lesson equips healthcare professionals with the skills and tools needed to respond compassionately and effectively during post-discharge follow-up calls using the Cares Connect methodology. As patients transition home, they may experience a range of emotions and concerns—this lesson prepares you to navigate these moments with empathy, clarity, and professionalism. This lesson also includes practical language, sample responses, and follow-up strategies to help you build trust, ensure clarity, and provide compassionate care throughout the discharge process. (Video duration 6mins: 06s)
The Discharge Phone Calls course is designed to empower you with the tools and context to elevate patient care and reinforce your organization’s commitment to excellence. By the end of this course, you’ll feel confident in using Cares Connect to enhance patient satisfaction, ensure continuity of care, and build meaningful connections with those you serve
This course provides healthcare professionals with the essential skills and strategies to conduct effective and compassionate post-discharge follow-up calls using the CARES Connect methodology. Designed to improve patient safety, satisfaction, and health equity while easing the burden on clinical teams, this course emphasizes the critical role of timely, thoughtful communication in the transition from hospital to home.
Through real-world examples and practical tools, participants will learn how to identify and resolve common post-discharge concerns—from medication confusion to care access barriers. The course explores the core principles of the CARES Connect approach, offering proven techniques such as the Teach-Back method, empathetic communication, and warm handoffs using information from the electronic health record. This course empowers healthcare professionals to be a vital, human connection in a vulnerable moment—ensuring every patient feels heard, prepared, and supported as they continue their care journey at home.
This course is best for:
Leaders
Physicians
Staff
Anyone looking to improve healthcare communication
Course Objectives
By the end of this 4-part course, you will be able to:
Conduct effective and supportive discharge phone calls
Address a variety of patient concerns with empathy and clarity
Collaborate efficiently with interdisciplinary care teams
Strengthen patient trust and engagement during transitions
Reduce readmissions and enhance overall care experiences
Physicians & Clinicians
We help provider teams thrive by creating resilient cultures where performance and passion converge. We help doctors and clinicians tap into their ability to dramatically change the life of their patients.
Leadership Development
We work with your goals to establish a Clinician Leadership Development Program. Assimilating learnings from a stakeholder engagement session dubbed the Clinician Leader Deep Dive, we will focus on competencies that elevate clinician engagement, communication, burnout reduction. There is a national need for clinician leadership development to establish a framework and foundation for healthy teams, managing others, and cultivating excellent patient experiences. Additionally, we may include Physician Office Managers in development activities to further build relationships to support market share objectives.
ED Coaching
Your Emergency Department (ED) is your front door, setting the stage for the community’s perception of your entire facility and the Always Experience. Our expert teams will assess, align and develop leaders, staff and physicians to execute and master proven competencies, experience standards, and processes yielding improved outcomes and sustainable results.
Medical Group Performance Improvement
Medical Clinic and Ambulatory experiences represent a vital step in the continuum of care. From scheduled imaging, to infusion, to the lab, physician visits and beyond demonstrating excellent care is necessary to create patient loyalty. Our coaches and consultants work with medical group teams to focus on teamwork, professionalism, patient-centered communication, and creating memorable patient experiences within their specific settings.
Managing Conflict Resolution
At the heart of healthy teamwork is the recognition that when a conflict occurs, those in positions of influence feel safe and supported to take swift action to resolve the issue and build trusting relationships among the team in the process. Our experts have developed a successful tool, the Conversation Curve to support leaders, staff, and physicians with the communication skills and resources to embrace conflict and create healthy resolution.
The Conversation Curve builds upon the perspectives of each party in conflict and matches their perceptions to communication and actions your employees can take. We begin by building assessing your current conflict challenge and communication competencies to Acknowledge Past, Sense Present and Realize Future, and line up the practice of achieving greater teamwork.
Resiliency and Burnout
Engagement and purpose is essential to excellent care delivery. We’ve worked with many organizations to build healthy cultures at the unit, department and organizational levels. We bring together best practices from a wide array of experience working across teams and health systems to deliver pragmatic approaches you can implement to make immediate changes.
We have found success in creating environments of engagement, joy, and positivity that in turn yield cultures of excellence. This does not mean organizations do not experience challenges, set backs, and devastation. These attributes do, however, set a standard for growth and achievement that stretches us to have greater expectations for what is possible and deserved by our workforce in service to our patients.
CARES™ Training
We understand that experiences are shaped by more than the words spoken and actions taken. Real encounters are complex and interactive, requiring planning and practice to achieve the best experience for both caregivers, their patients and their families.
CARES is a training tool designed to equip every team member in a healthcare organization with a common understanding and set of behaviors to deliver an exceptional patient and family experience. With a simple yet effective framework, CARES helps you to create an environment for delivering highly reliable patient and family experiences of care.
Clinicians Rounding on Patients
Leader Rounding on Patients is a purposeful management strategy to validate staff behaviors and to ensure a personal connection with patients. It provides leaders with a consistent, valid framework for harvesting recognition and intelligence to coach employees for improvement. It is also a tool to validate that CARES and Standards are used correctly and consistently by employees.
HCAHPS Intensive Workshops
Our HCAHPS Workshops are designed to create a learning experience that will jumpstart performance. By identifying strategies to truly engage staff and physicians in patient experience performance, this session will align key patient experience competencies with domain specific action plans. This learning event will empower your team with strategies and help develop tactics for your organization to administer excellent patient care, leading to higher HCAHPS scores and improved VBP reimbursements.
Compassion Tribe Premium
Create a personalized and custom engagement for your organization or departments via the Compassion Tribe Premium Program. Compassion Tribe Premium targets support for coping, resiliency, leading through change and patient-centeredness for specific team and organizational needs weekly training meetings and virtual coaching sessions that empower teams and departments.
Frontline Staff
We engage medical support and frontline staff in embracing compassionate care to patients that is both impactful and effective.
Standards of Behavior
We engage your champions to design and build a program to amplify your organization’s service standards for the patient experience. We work with your teams to establish standards that define accountability for how care is delivered and how teams work together to create a high performing organization.
Managing Conflict Resolutions
At the heart of healthy teamwork is the recognition that when a conflict occurs, those in positions of influence feel safe and supported to take swift action to resolve the issue and build trusting relationships among the team in the process. Our experts have developed a successful tool, the Conversation Curve to support leaders, staff, and physicians with the communication skills and resources to embrace conflict and create healthy resolution.
The Conversation Curve™ builds upon the perspectives of each party in conflict and matches their perceptions to communication and actions your employees can take. We begin by building assessing your current conflict challenge and communication competencies to Acknowledge Past, Sense Present and Realize Future, and line up the practice of achieving greater teamwork.
CARES™ Training
We understand that experiences are shaped by more than the words spoken and actions taken. Real encounters are complex and interactive, requiring planning and practice to achieve the best experience for both caregivers, their patients and their families.
CARES is a training tool designed to equip every team member in a healthcare organization with a common understanding and set of behaviors to deliver an exceptional patient and family experience. With a simple yet effective framework, CARES helps you to create an environment for delivering highly reliable patient and family experiences of care.
Service Excellence Training
We will apply our Learn | Create | Realize framework to design, develop and implement Service Excellence Behaviors that align and extend your organization’s values and performance goals. We will take the time to learn more about the culture and behaviors within your organization to best embrace existing strengths to achieve the highest possible impact and outcomes. We will develop your workforce using high-impact learning experiences to adopt service excellence behaviors. Attendees will be certified and walk away with a new sense of ownership towards a service culture.
Train the Trainer
The most sustainable path to creating an environment of “every patient, every time” is through consistent development, engagement, and accountability owned from within your organization. Our curriculum is delivered with identified champions through our “train the trainer” methodology. We train your internal coaches to administer our proven coaching model, and they in turn train your leaders, staff and physicians. This approach ensures internal mastery of skills, greater adoption of process changes, and an efficient way to deploy best practices across every department in a consistent way. Skilled internal champions leverage tactics that sustain change and execute ongoing process evaluation. Upon completion of the Train-the-Trainer program, internal champions are awarded certification and will drive organizational self-sufficiency and sustainable outcomes.
Compassion Tribe Premium
Create a personalized and custom engagement for your organization or departments via the Compassion Tribe Premium Program. Compassion Tribe Premium targets support for coping, resiliency, leading through change and patient-centeredness for specific team and organizational needs weekly training meetings and virtual coaching sessions that empower teams and departments.
