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With Medicare's stricter reimbursement guidelines and the likelihood that commercial payers will follow suit, it's more important than ever before for patients to move as quickly and safely as possible through the continuum of care, the experts say.
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A simple communication tool used by case management and nursing has decreased the turnaround between when discharge orders are issued and the time the patient is out the door at North Broward Medical Center in Deerfield Beach, FL.
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It took more than 260 days, hundreds of hours on the telephone, and a lot of networking and brainstorming for Chesapeake General Hospital in Chesapeake, VA, to find post-acute care for a seriously ill pediatric patient.
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Reducing readmissions has become an increasingly important goal for hospitals. Medicare is evaluating various payment incentives to encourage lower rates of preventable readmissions.
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Under updated infection control guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Standard Precautions now include respiratory/cough etiquette instructions.
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Case managers play a critical role in patient throughput and their voices should be heard whenever hospital staff meet to discuss barriers to admission and discharge and how they can be eliminated, says Charlotte Thompson, RRT, BA, MBA, manager in KPMG LLP's health care advisory practice.
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At Ingham Regional Medical Center in Lansing, MI, case managers take the lead in a multidisciplinary effort to increase the number of patients who are discharged by noon.
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Putting in place technology and processes to determine the financial resources of self-pay patients at the point of service (POS) has helped increase collections, reduce bad debt, and ensure accuracy of patient identification at Southern Regional Medical Center (SRMC) in Riverdale, GA, says Tracey Frederick, senior systems analyst.
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Patient access specialists at Texas Health Resources (THR) hospitals are learning their job "as it was meant to be learned," one of the many positive outcomes related to implementation of a centralized intake center at the Arlington-based health system, says the center's director, Jeff Ferrell.
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While the classic patient access mantra has become "garbage in, garbage out," managers themselves often fail to heed it, says Michael Friedberg, FACHE, CHAM, director, patient access services at Armanti Financial Services in Bloomfield, NJ.
