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The nuts and bolts of pandemic planning involve quantifiable items: Ventilators, respirators, antiviral medications, vaccine doses. But in the midst of drills and stockpiles and vaccine campaigns, don't forget about the psychosocial needs of your frontline employees.
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The Joint Commission is calling on health care administrators to take the lead in preventing infections with multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs), reminding them that current patient safety goals require CEOs to take responsibility for implementing programs to prevent these deadly and costly outcomes.
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The Joint Commission takes on the controversial issue of decolonization of patients carrying multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) in a new report aimed at health care CEOs. With more hospitals adopting active surveillance cultures to detect MDROs, the question of attempting to decolonize patients has become controversial due to issues of cost and long-term efficacy.
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National health care reform must include a quality component - including preventing health care-associated infections - if it is to become an effective and affordable reality, Mark R. Chassin, MD, president of The Joint Commission, notes in a commentary posted on the Joint Commission web site.
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If hospitals are going to avoid penalties for 30-day readmissions, they need to start now to identify their own patterns of what caused the readmissions and use that information to improve the discharge plan, suggests Jackie Birmingham, RN, MS, CMAC, vice president of professional services for Curaspan Health Group, a Newton, MA, health care technology and services firm.
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When the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) analyzed hospital readmission rates to post them on the Hospital Compare web site, the lowest heart failure readmission rate in the nation was at the Baylor Jack and Jane Hamilton Heart and Vascular Hospital.
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In an effort to clarify what had been confusing in the past, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) changed the wording of the observation orders and admission status, effective July 1.
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Now that hospitals' 30-day readmission rates for heart failure, heart attack, and pneumonia are being posted on the Hospital Compare web site, the stage is set for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to start reducing or eliminating payments for patients who are readmitted to the hospital.
