-
Hospice Care Plus of Berea, KY, switched to a pathway model for patient care in the mid-1990s as way to improve care for patients and their families. What theyve found in the decade since beginning the process of changing their care model is that it also has improved teamwork, communication, and staff satisfaction.
-
Case managers at Health Plan of Nevada interact face-to-face with their clients to coordinate their care, working with them in physician offices, specialty clinics, hospitals, and the patients home when necessary.
-
Though research and anecdotal evidence seem to show that integrating disability and health care programs for all injuries and illnesses whether suffered on the job or off can get employees back to work more quickly, prevent absences, and lower total benefit costs, most employers are slow to warm up to the idea.
-
Using a comprehensive approach to care management called Next Generation Care Management, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee has cut both the number of catastrophic case managers and the average caseload while increasing the savings per catastrophic case by 300%.
-
The National Quality Forum (NQF) has published a new set of national consensus standards, National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Cardiac Surgery, which provides a standardized set of measures and framework for improving the quality of cardiac surgery (which accounts for about 14,000 in-hospital deaths each year).
-
While the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) introduces new programs designed to address the care of chronically ill patients, home health agencies continue to find innovative ways to provide care to diabetic and congestive heart failure (CHF) patients two of the most common diagnoses identified as chronic illnesses.
-
After an exhaustive process that involved collecting and evaluating more than 150 separate definitions of case management, the Case Management Leadership Coalition (CMLC) has come up with a statement designed to help case managers explain what they do.
-
The University of Washington (UW) School of Public Health and Community Medicine in Seattle has received a two-year, $656,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to evaluate the impact of Group Health Cooperatives recent innovations to improve access and quality of care for its members.
-
On July 29, President Bush signed into law the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005, which will create legal and confidentiality protections for patient safety information that providers share for educational purposes and create patient safety organizations to promote information sharing.
-
Return to work can be challenging for any recovering or rehabilitating worker, but helping a new mother adjust to being back at work can require an occupational health nurse to be especially creative and understanding.
