-
In today's health care environment, case managers are under more pressure than ever to discharge patients from acute care; but before you send patients home with home health care, home medical equipment, or hospice services, make sure that they are appropriate for those services, advises Elizabeth Hogue, Esq., a Washington-DC based attorney specializing in health care issues.
-
Despite an increasing number of visits to the emergency department, Nyack (NY) Hospital has been able to meet its standard of 30-minute service 95% of the time and decreased its discharge length of stay in the ED by 35%.
-
If you want to effectively help patients and family members with end-of-life issues, you need to examine your own feelings about death and dying, says Catherine M. Mullahy, RN, BS, CRRN, CCM.
-
It's a situation case managers encounter with agonizing frequency: physicians who keep pumping medication into patients who are terminally ill or families who insist on continuing treatment when the clinical picture indicates that the patient's condition is terminal.
-
With the advent of pay for performance (P4P), what quality improvement professionals track and trend now could affect hospital reimbursement more than ever.
-
Although EDstat, a new eight-bed area that was added to the ED at Reston (VA) Hospital Center about a year ago, is only open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., it has helped to improve the performance of the entire ED. For example, in early spring 2007, before the new area opened, the percentage of patients who left the ED before treatment ranged from 2%-2.5% (statistics were measured monthly). Today, that has been reduced to 0.3%-0.4%.
-
An elderly man comes to your ED and is admitted to the hospital with severe dehydration and fever of unknown origin. Two days later, an X-ray reveals pneumonia.
-
Earlier intervention, a second pair of hands, and nurses love them these are all reasons why experts Hospital Peer Review spoke with are in favor of continuing the use of rapid response teams.
-
A pilot program that allows EDs and health care systems across Milwaukee to share patient information is expected to save thousands of dollars by eliminating redundant testing, while improving patient care.
-
A recent article in The Seattle Times tells the tale of a woman who inadvertently learned she had methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) while in the hospital from a nurse making an offhand comment. Since then, that woman, Jeanine Thomas, has been pushing for further disclosure from hospitals on MRSA.