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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.
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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.
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As health insurance costs escalate and employers provide a lower level of coverage for employees or cut out insurance benefits altogether, the number of workers with no health insurance is on the rise. Meanwhile, states are struggling with dwindling funds for Medicaid and are slashing benefits, and an unprecedented number of undocumented workers are seeking care in hospital emergency departments.
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The uninsured; The underinsured; Indigent patients; Undocumented workers.
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The sign over your emergency departments (ED) door may say emergency, but the people who walk in may not necessarily be having one.
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One of the great challenges in the whole world of quality and patient safety is learning to take advantage of the richness of clinical cases, says Robert M. Wachter, MD, professor and associate chairman in the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and chief of the medical service at UCSF Medical Center.
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A team approach and intensive case management of patients has helped San Francisco General Hospital cut the number of hospitalizations and costs for patients who were frequently hospitalized.
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Hospital discharge planners often have to use their ingenuity in finding placements for patients with no insurance who need post-acute services or are homeless and need a place to stay. The problem is that patients must be discharged safely, whether or not they have money to pay for the services they need.
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A pediatric asthma program that includes home visits by an asthma management team and an intensive educational program for families has resulted in a dramatic drop in emergency department (ED) visits for pediatric asthma patients at Hurley Medical Center in Flint, MI.
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The movement to prevent wrong-site or wrong-person surgery got another boost recently when a major health plan announced affective Jan. 1, 2005, it will no longer pay for medical procedures involving those egregious errors. Dont expect to get paid for a procedure if you leave that 12-inch retractor in the patients belly, or the next procedure to remove it.
