Hospital Case Management – February 1, 2009
February 1, 2009
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Help patients, families cope with end-of-life situations
It's a situation case managers encounter with agonizing frequency: physicians who keep pumping medication into patients who are terminally ill or families who insist on continuing treatment when the clinical picture indicates that the patient's condition is terminal. -
Get in touch with your feelings about EOL issues
If you want to effectively help patients and family members with end-of-life issues, you need to examine your own feelings about death and dying, says Catherine M. Mullahy, RN, BS, CRRN, CCM. -
Throughput measures decrease LOS in ED
Despite an increasing number of visits to the emergency department, Nyack (NY) Hospital has been able to meet its standard of 30-minute service 95% of the time and decreased its discharge length of stay in the ED by 35%. -
Critical Path Network: Multidisciplinary rounds at bedside involve patients, families
After Concord (NH) Hospital's multidisciplinary cardiac care team began holding daily collaborative rounds with patients and family members on the cardiac patient care unit, length of stay decreased and patient satisfaction scores rose. -
Critical Path Network: Program targets pneumonia quality measures
A comprehensive system to ensure that patients with pneumonia receive recommended care resulted in a significant increase in quality measure scores at Mission Hospital in Asheville, NC. -
Make sure patients are appropriate for home care
In today's health care environment, case managers are under more pressure than ever to discharge patients from acute care; but before you send patients home with home health care, home medical equipment, or hospice services, make sure that they are appropriate for those services, advises Elizabeth Hogue, Esq., a Washington-DC based attorney specializing in health care issues. -
Ambulatory Care Quarterly: Patient access using new Medicare noncoverage form
Patient access staff will have to get used to a change for Medicare patients, with the new Advance Beneficiary Notice of Noncoverage (ABN) form now used for all situations where Medicare payment is expected to be denied. The form, implemented by the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services (CMS), becomes mandatory -
Patient access attacks ED problem 'on many fronts'
If your hospital is like most, patients admitted through the emergency department are being held, possibly in hallways, for hours and even days. -
Machine-readable cards on horizon
The largest health plans appear to be in the process of adopting guidelines from the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI) for machine-readable insurance cards, according to Peter Barry, of Peter T. Barry Co., a Milwaukee-based consulting firm specializing in health care and information systems. Barry is chair of WEDI's initiative on health identification cards.