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Now that hospitals' 30-day readmission rates for heart failure, heart attack, and pneumonia are being posted on the Hospital Compare web site, the stage is set for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to start reducing or eliminating payments for patients who are readmitted to the hospital.
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Sutter Health's Sacramento Sierra Region's customized electronic case management system with embedded InterQual criteria enables the case management department to track everything from individual case manager performance to regional outcomes.
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At Sutter Health's Sacramento (CA) Sierra Region, case manager supervisors at each hospital conduct a secondary, retrospective review of 100% of one-day stays of Medicare patients to ensure that the individual case managers are making the right determination and using any deficits they uncover as an educational opportunity.
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Within 45 days after daily multidisciplinary patient care conferences were instituted at North Fulton Regional Hospital, the hospital's average length of stay dropped by more than a day and excess days decreased by more than 300 days within the first quarter of implementation.
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Patients with heart attacks and other forms of chest pain are three to five times more likely to experience serious complications after hospital admission when they are treated in a crowded ED, according to a new study published online in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine.
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The medical literature shows that educating children and their parents about asthma can reduce return visits to the ED as well as hospital admissions, and experts say the ED may well be the best place to provide that education.
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The ED at Twin County Regional Hospital in Galax, VA, succeeded in cutting its door-to-doc time from 121 minutes to 19 minutes in just seven weeks while annual volume was climbing from 19,000 to about 30,000 by combining a process improvement plan designed by a health care consulting firm, the leadership of the hospital CEO, and the ED's medical director.
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An Intranet application at Christiana Care Health System in Wilmington, DE, was developed specifically for patient access staff to improve registration accuracy.
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A newsletter is an inexpensive, simple way to inspire some friendly competition to motivate your patient access staff. At Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte, NC, the patient access department distributes a monthly newsletter featuring top performers for productivity and accuracy. Productivity is measured either by the number of accounts worked or registrations completed.
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According to Richard J. Suszek, director of patient financial services at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, the ED has been challenged to improve upfront collections in order to reduce bad debt and, also, to improve screening for Medicaid eligibility and financial assistance/charity care.
