Bereavement Professional

My Bereavement Coordinator and I are working to improve our bereavement program. What software do you utilize for bereavement? I use Netsmart Devero for an EMR and it has little to no bereavement tracking, address collection for mailings, etc.... could anyone help me understand what programs you use or how you track the dates for mailings and addresses of the bereaved?

Hi there, we are now using MyUnity for hospice/bereavement and it has been a big change from system we were using before...still trying to connect the parts and pieces for bereavement, The system is set up for creating an individual chart for all bereaved listed in the patient's chart after the pt dies. You can then set up bereavement activities based on risk level of bereaved, although most are receiving mailings or calls versus bereavement visits or counseling services. Was wondering if anyone else has switched to this system and how it has been working for you?

Good morning Deema,

We recently switched to using the KanTime EMR system and it has been OK so far.  As someone else said, we are able to track due dates for specific letters by adding individual letters to the bereaved person's care plan.  Each letter is set up with a specific date range for completion, such as 90 days after the bereaved person is admitted. For all activities that have due dates the system uses a widget to count all pending and overdue activities and will display them on our login dashboards.  This has been a nice feature.  However figuring out how to set it up for our needs took a significant amount of time and we have not worked out all of the kinks.  Supposedly the software developer is working on a way to store letters within the KanTime system.  For now we run a report for each letter based on the bereaved person's date of admission and create the labels through a mail merge in Word. KanTime creates an excel spreadsheet that is compatible with the mail merge process so we don't have to do any spreadsheet editing on our end.  So for the purpose of the mailings KanTime has been an improvement for us; however there are other areas in which it has made our processes much more cumbersome. For example, for some reason we are unable to link the profile of our bereaved person with the associated patient's medical record and then be able to quickly navigate to the patient's chart.  There are also a lot of issues with the system not remembering search criteria for lists you have to sort through frequently, such as when reviewing the intake list.  If your organization has you assigned to particular teams and you only want to see the bereaved people coming from those teams, you have to re-input all of your sorting criteria every time you finish reviewing a person's information and want to go on to the next one. Honestly, if you are just looking at something for your mailings I would go with an Excel spreadsheet and set up conditional formatting for the cells so you can track due dates.

Deema, 
What system does your clinical team utilize for an EMR system? We use HomeCare HomeBase for both clinical and Bereavement. 
A lot of the information communicates with each other pre-death and post-death. 

There are a lot of reports that I'm able to run to ensure we're staying within compliance, there is workflow as well that will alert the office staff to do things based on what is entered in by the field staff. In regard to Letters, we have it set up to pull 2 weeks before the letter is due, and it will automatically put all the addresses into an address label and/or letter with the bereaved's information. 

Good lucky on your searching. I hope you can find something that works for you and your team. 

Hello! We use KanTime for clinical and bereavement. We can track and save letters, import all the addresses, and add as needed. Hope this helps.

We use EPIC and change from Netsmart in 2018.  As a matter of fact, we were still using handwritten charts then and tracked our mailings on an excel spreadsheets. 

EPIC is pretty good for tracking mailings etc. doing reports to track numbers and suspense's.

 We had templates built into the system that matched our original care planning for each type of follow-up by risk level.  Each template is based on Risk level for the bereave.

We also can have multiple bereaved each attached to the patient with their own individual care plan based on needs.  The canned template can be adjusted accordingly to individual needs.

Theie is free text boxes for the notes based on the phone calls.

Mailings are scheduled in the template and batch mailings are completed from a report at the end of each month.  We do have to enter individual dates at times to ensure that the batch mailings are all done at the same time to allow for an administrative person staff or volunteer to handle the mailings instead of each counselor doing their own to save valuable time for the counselors. 

Hello.  We use MatrixCare which allows us to generate personalized letters of support at time increments that we have decided upon i.e. at 0,1,2,3,6,9,12 and  13 months.  I recommend the use of an ongoing spreadsheet wherein you add the name of each newly deceased patient and their date of death in chronological order.  The spreadsheet has columns going across  for Name, DOD, 0,1,2,3,6,9,12,13 and Contact names in landscape view.  When the name and DOD are entered into the spreadsheet it  then auto populates across the row - with all the dates when letters are due for that patient over the next 13 months.  We tend to run letter generations every 2 weeks because of high volume - but they can be run weekly or monthly.   We use our spreadsheet to easily identify letters due as we enter each new month.  At this moment I know all the patients who have letters due in March.   In a few days I will generate all letters due for the first 2 weeks of March.  You can then simply check off the letters that have been generated and sent. You will know if something is amiss, i.e. a letter is missing or a letter is generated that is not on the spreadsheet.  I have used this system successfully  for several years.  You may have some kind of master report showing all your deaths over the last 12-13 months and you could use it to  create a chronological spreadsheet…and then start filing in newly deceased names and DOD as you go forward.  You perhaps have a manual system with a file of letters for incremental mailing.  Perhaps you  could at least use the spreadsheet each month  to help you keep track of  when a letter or call  is due.   Hopes this helps.