Briefly Noted
Briefly Noted
• Of the respondents to the National Association for Home Care’s (NAHC; Washington) second annual survey addressing the use of information technology by home care organization, 86% said the top IT challenge over the next 12 months is reducing costs while maintaining the quality of care. NAHC conducted the cyber-survey at its recent annual meeting and home care expo. The second most mentioned IT challenge in the survey was managing the business aspects of the organizations. For more information on the survey results, visit NAHC’s Web site at www.nahc.org.
• Some home healthcare companies have been curbing services to "elderly and disabled patients with extensive medical problems" in an effort to counteract Medicare cuts, said a recent study released by researchers from George Washington University. The researchers surveyed 28 home care companies from nine states, including California, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Texas, and found that nearly two-thirds had taken steps to lower the proportion of very sick Medicare patients they serve. Those steps included: turning away patients who required longer term or repeated care, such as diabetics; eliminating specialist positions like cardiac nurses to avoid attracting patients with complex problems like congestive heart failure; directing marketing efforts at relatively healthy patients who need procedures with short recovery times; and pushing to discharge existing Medicare patients with chronic diseases into nursing homes or family care. Researcher Barbara Markham Smith said the study "raises the important question as to whether or not we have created a situation where the sicker patients in our society are not wanted by anybody because of the higher cost of their care."
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