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A robust emergency department case management program is becoming essential as hospitals struggling with capacity and payer sources clamp down on inappropriate admissions, says Toni Cesta, RN, PhD, FAAN, senior vice president, operational efficiency and capacity management at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY.
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Through a series of initiatives aimed at increasing patient throughput, Bay Medical Center in Panama City, FL, has lowered its average discharge time by two hours.
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Is a patient's account uncollectible? Is your self-pay patient eligible for financial assistance? Both of those scenarios are becoming more common due to the recession and if the answer to either of those questions is "yes," you should know sooner rather than later.
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The more your hospital does up front to prepare for Medicare's Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) program, the more money it will save in the long run, experts say.
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During the Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) demonstration project, the auditors were extremely focused on the level-of-care orders to the point of denying admissions that did not have a clear admission order such as "admit to inpatient."
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Case managers are under pressure to discharge patients as quickly as possible from the acute care hospital, but they may have liability for negligent, premature discharge, according to Elizabeth Hogue, Esq., a Washington-DC based attorney specializing in health care issues.
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Researchers who reviewed thousands of studies have found that enhanced hospital discharge support might prevent or delay hospital readmissions for heart failure and stroke patients.
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When the RN clinical documentation improvement specialists at Central DuPage Hospital set up a networking meeting with their peers from other hospitals in northern Illinois, they never dreamed that their efforts would lead to the formation of a new organization with regular meetings.
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It took Nancy Sikorski, RN, BA, nearly four months of research, telephone calls, and e-mails to bring together some of the RN clinical documentation improvement specialists in northern Illinois for a meeting.
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A new plan for admitting patients from the ED at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore jointly developed by an ED physician and a hospitalist, decreased ED throughput for admitted patients 98 minutes (from 458 minutes to 360 minutes) from the same period a year earlier, despite an 8.8% increase in the ED census.
