-
A post-discharge follow-up program for congestive heart failure (CHF) patients has decreased the readmission rate by more than half at Harper University Hospital in Detroit. Nurse case managers specially trained to do triage assessment by telephone follow up with the CHF patients after discharge, making sure patients monitor their weight and blood pressure on a daily basis and reinforcing the patient education instructions patients received during their hospital stay.
-
What has been called the first large-scale study to examine patient safety issues for isolated coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) showed that hospitals with the highest compliance with three recommended protocols had notably lower risk-adjusted mortality rates than those hospitals whose compliance ranked in the bottom 20%.
-
She may be an ideal candidate for thrombolytic therapy: A woman tells triage nurses that she first noticed symptoms exactly two hours ago. But by the time the patient is appropriately assessed, the window of time for eligibility to be treated with thrombolytics has passed.
-
One of the issues constantly plaguing emergency departments (EDs) is the hidden bed a precious commodity when a crunch is on. But there are a number of methods that can help identify those beds sooner, says Marty Karpiel, FACHE, FHFMA, president of Karpiel Consulting Group in Long Beach, CA.
-
Sometime in the next few years, your hospital could receive some of its Medicare reimbursement based on how well it performs, if the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) follows its typical course of action.
-
Case managers will be invaluable to their hospitals if the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) institutes pay-for-performance measures for all hospitals, Teresa Fugate, RN, BBA, CPHQ, CCM, asserts.
-
The National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care, a consortium of five palliative care organizations, has released a set of clinical practice guidelines to promote quality palliative care in the United States.
-
In addition to increased numbers of mentally ill patients, emergency departments (EDs) are seeing more uninsured patients than in the past, and the numbers could grow, warns Brian Hancock, MD, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) in Irving, TX. Your budget planning should factor in more uninsured patients, not just the same level you have coped with for years.
-
In 1999, Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas had a denial rate of 1.12% of gross revenue at year end. The denial rate began to decline steadily following the implementation of a denials management team and process improvement teams, both of which include members of the case management staff. The process has saved millions of dollars. For fiscal year 2003, the denial rate has dropped to 0.2% of gross revenue.
-
When it comes to improving quality, sometimes the simplest and least expensive measures work best, reports Earl Kurashige, RN, project manager for Qualis Health, a nonprofit health care quality improvement organization based in Seattle.
