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Strategic Program Shortens Urban Hospital’s Length of Stay
As urban hospitals grapple with length of stay penalties, they must help their patients solve everyday problems. Lack of resources is a fact of life for inner city residents, and hospitals need to find a way to help those patients overcome those obstacles — and reduce length of stay.
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Hospital Collaborates With EMS to Bring Case Management to Homes
An Ohio hospital’s population included people with lower income, less education, and many health challenges. Case management could help once these people entered the hospital, but the challenge was to prevent the problems that first led to ED visits and rehospitalizations.
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‘Person-Centered’ vs. ‘Patient-Centered’ Care
Long-term support services should provide “person-centered care,” according to a 2014 rule from CMS. In everyday patient care, this translates into a focus on learning a patient’s wants and needs, which helps the case manager align treatment with the patient’s desires.
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Value-Based Care: Tips for Case Managers
Hospitals are struggling to meet the goals of value-based payment models. Value-based models are designed to improve outcomes, such as quality of care, satisfaction, and complications, while reducing costs. The impetus comes from CMS, which has set quality and efficiency standards for hospitals.
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To Build a Case Management Team, Focus on Engagement
There is not one specific way to improve case management and develop the best teams. But a good first step is to identify team members and to focus on the correlation between their skill sets, engagement, and outcomes.
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Antivaccine Movement Pushing States on Immunization
Employee health professionals should be aware that the national antivaccine movement is lobbying state legislatures to restrict or limit use of vaccines critical for public health. Vaccine avoidance based on misinformation threatens herd immunity and vulnerable populations that cannot be immunized. The Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology is staying abreast of this trend, and advising vaccine advocates to speak up if they see such laws appear on their state dockets.
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Patient Handling Challenges for the OR Nurse
While the operating room is on the cutting edge in innovative technology and procedures, the ability to safely handle and reposition patients too often is stuck in the past. The Association of periOperative Registered Nurses is emphasizing the risk of injury to healthcare workers in moving and handling surgical patients, and has issued guidelines and toolkits to address the issue.
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An Unusual and Persistent Needlestick
A lab worker sustained a needlestick exposure to the Vaccinia virus (VACV) — an Orthopoxvirus used in biomedical research — and was removed from work for four months, the CDC reported. In December 2018, a healthy, 26-year-old female laboratorian was injecting VACV into the tail of a mouse when she sustained a needlestick injury to her left index finger.
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Sharps Injuries: Emotional, Statistical Challenges
The emotional toll of needlesticks and sharps injuries to healthcare workers often is overshadowed by the sheer numbers and statistical analysis. The ongoing study of sharps injuries and exposures in healthcare workers is supported by The Association of Occupational Health Professionals in Healthcare.
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Mass Flu Shots of More than 8,000 Healthcare Workers in One Day
Through a wide-reaching mass flu immunization effort that doubled as an emergency drill, a healthcare system in Delaware recently vaccinated a staggering 8,035 employees in a single day. Such an effort takes considerable planning and administrative support, but there are a multitude of positives — not the least of which is readying a large portion of staff for flu season before the annual virus starts circulating.