Inside Northwell Health’s ED Follow-Up Playbook: Reducing Returns and Improving Throughput
What happens after a patient leaves the emergency department is often where performance is won, or lost.
This episode features a presentation from the recently held ROI-Centered Care Summit, a half-day virtual summit produced by Bright Spots Ventures in partnership with TytoCare and the American Telemedicine Association (ATA).
In this episode, Albert Villarin, MD, MBA, FACEP, VP & Chief Medical Information Officer at Northwell Health, shares how his team redesigned the ED follow-up model to reduce avoidable returns, improve patient experience, and shorten length of stay, by rethinking discharge as the start of a coordinated, end-to-end process.
Rather than treating discharge as a handoff, Northwell Health built an integrated model that connects workflows across clinical teams, patient communication, and technology, ensuring patients not only receive instructions, but understand and act on them.
You’ll hear how Northwell Health:
- Builds a connected follow-up model across the full patient journey, from admission through post-discharge touchpoints
- Uses automated outreach, education, and callback workflows to close care gaps after ED visits
- Embeds language access and fully translated discharge instructions into core workflows to improve safety and reduce readmissions
- Standardizes discharge processes to ensure consistency and reliability at scale
- Leverages AI and automation (including ambient listening and documentation support) to reduce clinician burden while improving patient understanding
Key topics covered:
- Why many ED return visits are driven by breakdowns after discharge, not during care delivery
- Discharge as a system, not an event
- Closing the loop after ED visits to reduce unnecessary utilization
- Reducing variation in patient communication and follow-up
- The role of language access as a clinical and operational lever
- Using automation to scale reliable, repeatable care processes
If you’re a health system leader, emergency medicine executive, or operations leader working to reduce avoidable utilization, improve throughput, and deliver more consistent patient experiences, this episode offers a practical, system-level blueprint grounded in real-world execution.
