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The good news for home health providers is that as the numbers of patients seeking home care rises, so do the satisfaction levels reported by home health patients.
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A combination of face-to-face and telephonic case management has resulted in high patient satisfaction ratings and a significant decrease in health care utilization for patients with complex medical needs.
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Home health agencies will receive a slightly worse than proposed payment update from Medicare in calendar year 2010, for an average net payment decrease of 1.03%, according to the final rule released by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
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A family member's statement that "Dad's pain is really helped by methadone rather than hydrocodone," should serve as a red flag for any hospice nurse, says Debbie Williams, RN, CHPC, administrator of Agape Hospice in Minden, LA. Any time a family member or friend of the patient is naming specific drugs to bring into the house, you should be suspicious of drug diversion, she says.
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There are two ways that the staff at Agape Hospice have identified cases of medication diversion by employees. One involved patients reporting less medication in the bottle than listed on the label. Another involved a nursing home hospice patient who was receiving pain medication on an as-needed basis but was running out of pills before the nurse's next visit.
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Add guitars and other musical instruments to the tools caregivers can use to help patients in hospice care. That's what University of Alabama (UA) senior Sarah Pitts found when she brought her music therapy skills to patients in Hospice of West Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
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Chronic pain is experienced by as many as two out of three older adults. Now, a new study finds that pain may be more hazardous than previously thought, contributing to an increased risk of falls in adults over age 70. The findings appear in the Nov. 25 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
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More than 35% (35.4%) of patients served by hospices in 2008 died or were discharged in seven days or less, reports the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO). This reflects a 4.6% increase from 2007, when 30.8% of patients had what is considered a short hospice experience.
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While the details of health care reform, and the outcome of debates and votes, were uncertain at press time, a review of the two health care reform bills under debate do point out two areas that home health and hospice agencies can look ahead to implement.
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A hospice nurse in Colorado was arrested in July for using a patient's name to obtain pain medication. The nurse also was charged in November for using a physician's name along with patient names to forge prescriptions for more than 4,000 pain pills.
