How Hospital Discharge Planners Find Care Placements Faster

Hospital discharge planning is one of the most time-pressured jobs in healthcare. A patient is medically stable and ready to leave. The bed is needed for the next admission. Insurance authorization is ticking. And the discharge planner is on hold with the fifth facility this morning — still no available beds.

This is the daily reality for social workers and discharge planners across Michigan. FindABed was built specifically to solve it.

The Core Problem

The traditional discharge workflow looks like this:

• Determine appropriate level of care
• Get a list of facilities (often a printed directory or memory)
• Call each facility to ask about bed availability
• Wait on hold, leave voicemails, wait for callbacks
• When you find availability, fax or email intake paperwork
• Repeat across multiple clients simultaneously

The bottleneck is availability data. Most facilities don't publish real-time bed status anywhere. Discharge planners are making dozens of calls a day for information that could be displayed on a screen.

How FindABed Changes the Workflow

FindABed gives providers a simple dashboard to mark beds available, occupied, or pending — and that status is visible to social workers in real time.

A discharge planner can:

• Search by county, care type, and insurance — filter results to exactly what the patient qualifies for
• See bed availability without calling — green means available, gray means full
• Send a referral in two clicks — no fax, no email chain, no waiting
• Track every placement in one place — pending, accepted, declined, placed

For high-volume social workers handling 20+ cases at once, this compresses hours of phone time into minutes of searching.

It's Free for Social Workers

FindABed is free forever for social workers and discharge planners. There are no tiers, no trial periods, no hidden fees. The business model is on the provider side.

What Michigan Facilities Are Listed?

FindABed indexes 5,600+ Michigan care providers across 12 care types: adult foster care, assisted living, memory care, independent living, skilled nursing, rehabilitation, hospice, home care, sober living, group homes, transitional housing, and veterans housing.

Data is sourced from Michigan LARA, CMS Care Compare, and the Michigan Adult Foster Care Association — and updated by providers directly when they claim their listing.