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As the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act makes sweeping changes in the health care environment, case managers have the opportunity to be the critical link between the patients and providers.
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Sonia Hoffman, RN, BSN, a Geisinger Health Plan case manager who works at a primary care clinic, tells the following story of how her interventions kept a woman with severe chronic obstructive disease out of the hospital and avoided unnecessary utilization of health care resources:
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Geisinger Health Plan's patient-centered medical home pilot project, which placed case managers in primary care practices, reduced hospital admissions for heart failure, pneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and the frail elderly within six months, and ultimately demonstrated a 20% reduction in hospital readmissions.
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If you can discover why an employee performed a job incorrectly, which caused a near-miss accident that could have been fatal to other workers, wouldn't this information be priceless to you?
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Do you think that better health is enough of a reward for employees who choose to take a health risk assessment? That may not be sufficient, if you want participation rates to brag about.
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While considering the "community" in community-engaged research may add new issues for IRBs to consider, they're not in this job alone.
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Preparation is key to improving a human subjects protection program, and this could include attending to details, such as creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) for making new SOPs, one IRB director has found.
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IRBs should move toward risk management rather than risk aversion, and one way to do this is by obtaining information that provides deeper institutional memory of review outcomes in studies, one expert says.
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For many IRBs, the hybrid electronic/paper systems they've used for a half decade or longer are ready to be replaced. Research and medical institutions are moving toward full electronic communication systems, and IRBs will need to make the leap too.
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To learn the difference collecting and analyzing metrics can make for an IRB, it may be helpful to be a proverbial fly on the wall at the offices of the Vanderbilt University Human Research Protection Program (HRPP).