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Every day, we are confronted by problems that need solving. The problem might present itself simply as a minor inconvenience, or the problem may be a significant variance from ideal clinical practices. Whatever challenges your organization faces, effective problem-solving skills are needed to deal with the issues.
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Before Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Orange County, CA, started its collaborative care initiatives for case management and social work, the two disciplines often were at odds with each other.
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When Teresa C. Fugate, RN, BBA, CPHQ, CCM, developed the case management program for a hospital in which she worked, she included a provision promising that what the case managers saved by preventing extra days and avoiding denials would equal their salaries plus benefits.
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ED volume increasing, most hospitals report.
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A dedicated billing analyst for your emergency department (ED) can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars that goes straight to the bottom line instead of just flying out the window, say two managers who have added about $300,000 a year.
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An adult patient with fever and cough: This is something you probably see at least once a day and perhaps dozens of times a day in your emergency department (ED) during the flu season. But did you know about new recommendations that call for changes concerning when patients receive antibiotics, which diagnostic tests they are given, and whether they are discharged or admitted?
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For case managers working in an acute-care environment, advocacy is a fundamental principle of the services they provide. Advocacy may be described simply as wanting, getting, and doing what is in the best interest of the patient and the family. In practice, however, case managers find themselves acting as advocates not only for the patient and family but for the hospital and provider of care as well.
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Before Virtua Health instituted a Six Sigma project to improve its congestive heart failure program, the hospital systems average length of stay (LOS) was 6.5 days, compared with the Medicare benchmark of 4.2 days. After a pilot project at one of the Marlton, NJ-based nonprofit health care providers four hospitals, the LOS dropped to four days with a savings of $116,000 per year in staff and room costs.
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A new preadmission program at the University of California (UC) Davis Health System is building a stronger link between hospital and physicians office and identifying issues much earlier in the process issues that might affect length of stay (LOS).
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Winning physician buy-in, one of the toughest challenges in any process improvement (PI) endeavor, was the key to success in a PI project undertaken by Peninsula Regional Medical Center in Salisbury, MD.
