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When patients are discharged from the ED at Rice Memorial Hospital in Willmar, MN, they never need to worry about how and where to obtain their take-home meds. Since Sept. 19, 2007, they have been able to obtain their prescription meds directly from a "vending machine" located in the department and operational 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
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In the preamble to the new Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) regulations of 2003, some commenters stated that some physicians may choose to come to a hospital to see private patients at times when they are not shown as being on call under the listing the hospital maintains for EMTALA purposes, notes Alan Steinberg, Esq., an attorney with Horty Springer in Pittsburgh.
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If an emergency physician is arrested for assaulting a patient or for inappropriate sexual conduct, there is potential liability exposure for both the hospital where the ED is located and the emergency medicine (EM) group, says Thomas H. Taylor, a health care attorney at LaCrosse, WI-based Johns Flaherty.
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In this age of evidence-based practice and cost containment in health care, effective discharge planning is increasingly important. But how is effective discharge planning defined and measured?
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Successful discharge planning is a much more complex process than simply moving patients safely out the door, so it follows that evaluating your discharge planning process also might be a complex proposition.
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Preparing to discharge a frail, elderly patient is a task that shouldn't be taken lightly in any setting, but for Priscilla F. Cutler, MSW, LICSW, MFA, ensuring that an elderly patient's safety net is in place can prove challenging in a mountainous, lightly populated area of New Hampshire.
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Medicare providers by now should have begun using the revised advance beneficiary notice (ABN) of coverage to let participants know when Medicare is unlikely to cover their care.
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The Joint Commission in 2006 initiated a new standard that demands "accurate and complete reconciliation of medications across the continuum of care," but nurses and case managers at Mercy Health Center in Oklahoma City were way ahead of them. Long troubled by discrepancies in patients' in-hospital and at-home medications, they already had a solution in the works.
