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Readmissions among all heart failure patients dropped by 50% in the first year of Saddleback Memorial Medical Center's comprehensive heart failure program, which focuses on a smooth transition between the hospital and the community.
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Recognizing that the transition between the short-term acute care hospital and a long-term acute care hospital (LTAC) is difficult for patients and families, Mesquite Specialty Hospital in Dallas has begun weekly orientation sessions to help family members understand what an LTAC is and how the services a patient will receive there are different from what happens in the short-term acute care hospital.
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Hospital case managers are involved with patients from admission through the entire episode of care and discharge, which puts them in a position to spot patient safety issues and work on ways to prevent them, says John Banja, PhD, professor of rehabilitation medicine, medical ethicist at Emory University's Center for Ethics and director of the Section on Ethics in Research at Emory's Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute.
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As health care reform rolls out, hospitals will be under more pressure to deliver care faster and more efficiently with better outcomes, coordinating care while patients are still in the hospital, and ensuring a smooth transition to the next level of care. And that's where case managers can make a difference, experts say.
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Taking nearly seven months to transition from an ED staffing model of a contracted physician group to one that involved a partnership with a neighboring medical school might seem overly long, but the leadership at St. Joseph's Hospital in Buckhannon, WV, says they wanted to "do it right." That process included bringing on properly credentialed physicians, as well as doctors who would relate well with the surrounding community.
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"Good people who exercised poor judgment" recently took cell phone pictures of a shark attack victim who later died in the ED at Martin Memorial Medical Center in Stuart, FL, according to a statement released by hospital officials. Although no staff members were fired, the hospital has disciplined several ED employees for taking the cell phone pictures and has asked anyone with copies of the photos to destroy them.
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In a new Sentinel Event Alert, The Joint Commission focused on an issue to which ED managers are no strangers.
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Did a patient wait a long time in your ED, and did that patient have an adverse outcome? If these two events can be linked together by a plaintiff's attorney, it could result in a successful malpractice lawsuit against your staff or your institution.
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In the face of steadily increasing volumes (13,000 between 2008 and 2009), the ED at Peninsula Regional Medical Center in Salisbury, MD, has improved all of its operating statistics, achieving a 'door-to-bed' time of three minutes and a door-to-doc time of 21 minutes.
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[Editor's note: ED Management issued an e-bulletin to readers on March 24, 2010, about health care reform's impact on EDs. We also described recent studies on the impact of health care reform in Massachusetts on ED crowding. ED Management issues such bulletins to keep readers informed of the latest developments in emergency management. If you wish to receive future ED Management bulletins, contact customer services at (800) 688-2421 or
[email protected].]
