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After three years, Massachusetts General Hospital's Medicare demonstration project to manage the care of high-risk, high-cost Medicare patients appears to be making a difference for many medically complex patients, according to Joanne Kaufman, RN, MPA, A-CCC, nurse manager for the care management program at Massachusetts General.
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Here's a common hospital discharge scenario: the patient is ready to be discharged home, and the hospital has a discharge planner or case manager who is prepared to call the patient's primary care physician (PCP) to discuss the patient's post-discharge care. But who does the discharge planner call? And will anyone respond to the call?
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As part of its efforts to increase transparency in health care and to help consumers make informed decisions about which hospital to choose, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) expanded the information on the Hospital Compare website, adding 10 new outpatient measures and updated information on 30-day mortality and readmission rates for heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, and pneumonia.
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In just a few years, your hospital could lose a significant amount of money if its 30-day readmission rate is higher for Medicare patients with certain diagnoses than the rate at other hospitals.
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When a hospital in downtown Knoxville, TN, closed and volume soared at other nearby hospitals, two hospitals in the Covenant Health System joined forces to develop a systematic approach to capacity management that allows each hospital to create variances in the process to meet its individual needs.
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Your ED patient's bad outcome might have nothing to do with the fact that he or she was held in the hallway while awaiting an inpatient bed. However, it could impact the outcome of subsequent litigation against the ED.
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Despite dramatic and widely reported breakthroughs in preventing bloodstream infections, the cold truth is that too many infection preventionists labor in obscurity, their programs woefully underfunded by administrators blind to the power of prevention.
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Infection preventionists must seize an extraordinary moment in health care, when divergent forces are aligning to redesign a system that has failed to contain costs and protect the lives to which it has been entrusted, Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, said recently in New Orleans in the keynote address at the 37th annual educational conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).
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Alarming public health officials, a highly drug-resistant gram negative bacterial strain that is emerging rapidly in hospitals in India has been detected in patients in three U.S. states.
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Hospitals that adopt advanced computer technology to identify healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are more likely to have implemented best practices to prevent such infections, according to research presented recently in New Orleans at the annual conference of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).
