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The annual number of patients discharged from U.S. community hospitals to home health care rose 53% between 1997 and 2006, while the number discharged to long-term care and other facilities rose 30%, according to a new report from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
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Monthly diabetes group visits, where patients receive all their recommended tests and examinations in one place, are an effective and cost-efficient way to help diabetics keep their disease under control, but they take a lot of organization, says Donna Zazworsky, RN, MS, CCM, FAAN, manager of network diabetes care, faith community nursing and telemedicine for Carondelet Health Network in Tucson, AZ.
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The Joint Commission's revised standards, rationales, and elements of performance for 2009 for home care, which includes hospice, now are available online.
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Case conferences can be an excellent way to improve communications between staff members and ensure that the plan of care is up to date. The challenge presented by case conferences for hospice and home health agencies is the staff's perception that time spent in meetings is not time well spent for patient care.
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"Home health nurse arrested for theft.".... "Family accuses home health nurse of stealing from patient." All home health managers cringe when they see the increasing number of headlines that proclaim home health nurses or aides as guilty of stealing from patients. Are these headlines aberrations, or is there a real, growing trend in the home health industry?
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One after the other, videotapes on primetime news showed a patient, Esmin Green, being ignored by ED staff as she lay dying on a waiting room floor in a Brooklyn psychiatric hospital after waiting almost 24 hours for a bed. What impact will this "horror story" case, and others like it, have on ED litigation?
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A patient, Scruggs, presented to Danville (VA) Regional Medical Center (DRMC) ED about 2 a.m. complaining of two days of prolonged dry heaves. He was triaged in the usual manner, prioritized as "non-urgent," and instructed to wait in the waiting area until his name was called. The court pointedly noted that the triage nurse failed to document the patient's "diabetic ketoacidosis condition or his history of diabetes."
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Many hospitals have been cited by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) for failure to provide an appropriate medical screening examination for mental health patients, or for discharging these patients in an unstabilized emergency medical condition, notes Barbara E. Person, JD, an attorney at the Omaha, NE-based law firm Baird Holm.
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"Quit dreaming that your patients are being watched by physicians in the ED." That's what the vice chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at State University of New York at Stony Brook told physicians when he sought buy-in for a process to move patients boarded in the ED upstairs during high capacity.
