Hospital Case Management 2004-12-01

Pensacola hospital and patients survive battering by Hurricane Ivan

It was about 2 a.m., Sept. 16, when Hurricane Ivan roared into Pensacola, FL, with 130-mile-per-hour winds, battering the boarded-up windows of Sacred Heart Hospital, knocking out the electricity and forcing the hospital to operate on emergency generators. Many staff had arrived at the hospital before the storm hit, anticipating problems with transportation afterward, and they all sprang into action to make sure the patients and more than 2,000 family members of patients and staff being sheltered at the hospital were safe.

Team approach avoids denials and saves millions

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.

Get ready for emphasis on quality measures

Public reporting of quality measures is likely to increase in the near future, and hospitals should get ready, asserts Carolyn Scott, director of collaborative services and CEO work groups for clinical excellence with VHA Inc., an Irving, TX-based health care cooperative.

Simple measures result in big quality improvements

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.

Critical Path Network: New care management model cuts LOS, observation days

Redesigning the care management model and creating a resource center to free the clinical staff from clerical work has resulted in decreases in length of stay and helped drop denials for clinical reasons to zero at St. Vincents Medical Center in Jacksonville, FL.

Critical Path Nework: St. Vincent’s Hospital Resource Center Positions

Descriptions of the following positons: Payer specialists, Placement specialist, Denials management specialist, Staff assistants and Department secretary.

Ambulatory Care Quarterly: ED sees 50% reduction in time from triage to ED bed

In this first part of a two-part series on benchmarking, we tell about two hospitals that achieved dramatic reductions in length of stay (LOS). Next month, we discuss how to speed up admissions by addressing virtual capacity issues with the entire hospital.

Guest Column: How to unjam your discharge bottlenecks

Are admitted patients being held for a long time in the emergency department while they wait for an inpatient bed to become available? Do patients in specialty care units stay longer than necessary because there is no general unit bed for them to be transferred to?

Hospital Case Management – December 1, 2004

December 1, 2004