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Some health care facilities provide medical treatment to people throughout the United States, while others serve those who live in the surrounding neighborhood.
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Dr. Eric Toner is a senior associate with the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). He is a physician board certified in internal medicine and emergency medicine.
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Knowing your readmission rate is critical and will become even more important as the health care industry waits for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' decision on how to alter reimbursement based on rehospitalization rates.
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While measure sets on venous thromboembolism (VTE) and stroke were expected to be part of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' (CMS) recently released proposed 2010 rule for the inpatient prospective payment system (IPPS), the draft did not include those as required measure sets for reporting in 2010.
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Much like it did with the accreditation standards, The Joint Commission is considering "recategorizing" the core measures into groups, says Jerod M. Loeb, PhD, executive vice president for quality measurement and research.
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One patient who was attending a preoperative class for joint replacement patients at Geisinger Health System joked that he was being discharged before he ever got to the hospital, recalls Trisha Whispell, BSN, MSW, ACS, social work care manager, who, with her RN care manager partner, presents a pre-admission class on joint replacement and manages care for patients after surgery.
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The senior emergency center at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, MD, may be a rarity, but based on the responses of patients and staff not to mention our increasingly aging population perhaps more EDs should consider creating a separate unit for older patients.
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A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, "Rehospitalizations among patients in the Medicare fee-for-service program," is getting a lot of press and attention, and was the subject of a webinar presented by The Commonwealth Fund. That organization's vice president, quality improvement and efficiency, Anne-Marie Audet tells Hospital Peer Review why readmission rates should be one of your top priorities.
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As we move toward myriad changes in the way health care is paid for and move toward a system that becomes increasingly tied in to value-based purchasing, Cheryl Wagonhurst, partner with Folley & Lardner LLP, suggests quality managers look at the big picture and create strategic plans to address quality as a broader, holistic objective.
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The Joint Commission's latest sentinel event alert urges caution and foresight in dealing with the safety risks and preventable adverse events associated with technology-related errors, "as health information technology (HIT) and 'converging technologies' the interrelationship between medical devices and HIT are increasingly adopted by health care organizations."
