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Before Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Orange County, CA, started its collaborative care initiatives for case management and social work, the two disciplines often were at odds with each other.
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Every day, we are confronted by problems that need solving. The problem might present itself simply as a minor inconvenience, or the problem may be a significant variance from ideal clinical practices. Whatever challenges your organization faces, effective problem-solving skills are needed to deal with the issues.
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Control charts, quality tools that can help tighten the focus on process variations, increasingly are gaining acceptance among some health care quality professionals. In fact, a number of Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations requirements specifically mention the use of control charts.
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An adult patient with fever and cough: This is something you probably see at least once a day and perhaps dozens of times a day in your emergency department (ED) during the flu season. But did you know about new recommendations that call for changes concerning when patients receive antibiotics, which diagnostic tests they are given, and whether they are discharged or admitted?
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A dedicated billing analyst for your emergency department (ED) can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars that goes straight to the bottom line instead of just flying out the window, say two managers who have added about $300,000 a year.
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ED volume increasing, most hospitals report.
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Before Virtua Health instituted a Six Sigma project to improve its congestive heart failure program, the hospital systems average length of stay (LOS) was 6.5 days, compared with the Medicare benchmark of 4.2 days. After a pilot project at one of the Marlton, NJ-based nonprofit health care providers four hospitals, the LOS dropped to four days with a savings of $116,000 per year in staff and room costs.
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For case managers working in an acute-care environment, advocacy is a fundamental principle of the services they provide. Advocacy may be described simply as wanting, getting, and doing what is in the best interest of the patient and the family. In practice, however, case managers find themselves acting as advocates not only for the patient and family but for the hospital and provider of care as well.
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A new preadmission program at the University of California (UC) Davis Health System is building a stronger link between hospital and physicians office and identifying issues much earlier in the process issues that might affect length of stay (LOS).
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When Christiana Hospital in Newark, DE, first instituted its hospitalist program in 1994, the hospital experienced a big drop in length of stay, especially with the uninsured patients who had no particular physician watching over them, recalls Thomas Mannis, MD, senior medical advisor for case management and head of the division of hospitalists.
