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When you think about the new Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations survey process, do you envision surveyors talking to your organizations least articulate staff members, selecting patients to trace for whom everything possible has gone wrong, and arriving at units when your most experienced nurses are nowhere in sight?
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In addition to increased numbers of mentally ill patients, emergency departments (EDs) are seeing more uninsured patients than in the past, and the numbers could grow, warns Brian Hancock, MD, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) in Irving, TX. Your budget planning should factor in more uninsured patients, not just the same level you have coped with for years.
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One of the best ways to gain hospitalwide commitment to performance excellence is through participation in a self-assessment using the criteria of the Malcolm Baldrige Quality award.
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Would you like to improve retention and satisfaction of nursing staff and make patients safer at the same time? The two goals are intrinsically linked, according to Diana Berkland, MS, RN, vice president of clinical administrative services and chief nurse executive at Sioux Valley Hospital USD Medical Center in Sioux Falls, SD.
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If your hospital is a large urban facility, you may have large numbers of staff with individual departments responsible for performance improvement, patient safety, and data collection and abstracting. Unfortunately, many quality managers at smaller facilities are not so lucky.
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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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If you are a case manager who also is performing disease management activities, keep in mind that the two activities require distinctly different skill sets, suggests Rufus Howe, RN-C, MN.
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In the first 12 months of a comprehensive disease management program for members with 17 chronic conditions and diseases, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota saved $36 million in claims, with a return-on-investment of $2.90 for every dollar spent.
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A Medicaid disease management program represents a huge potential to improve the health of the publicly insured while decreasing overall health care costs, Sandeep Wadhwa, MD, asserts.
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