After physicians treat them in the emergency department (ED), millions of patients each year head home to recover, but not all of them do so successfully. Many wind up needing to head right back to the hospital because something goes wrong and the discharge fails. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) recently partnered with the Johns Hopkins University Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality to study this issue.
This week’s updates include solicitation of new safe harbor and special fraud alerts and changes to the Recovery Audit Program. Click the link above to read more about this week’s updates.
Q: My facility no longer registers patients under aliases, but will allow them to opt out of the patient directory. However, opting out of the registry will not exclude our patients from the operating room (OR) list. At one time, the facility's CEO received the daily OR list with full patient names so he could visit board members, donors, or others whom he knows at our facility. HIM changed this practice so that patients' names would not be on the OR schedule provided to the CEO. The CEO took this matter to the hospital attorney, who said the names could be included because the use of PHI by the CEO to determine whether and when a patient visit is appropriate is permitted by HIPAA as it is part of healthcare operations. Is it a violation of HIPAA for the CEO to use PHI to track patients in this manner?
Do observation patients belong in their own unit? The answer is debated at many organizations. Some say establishing a separate unit brings numerous advantages, from improved ED throughput to shorter lengths of stay. Others say some facilities may not need one.
Preventing readmissions is a hot topic these days. CMS has imposed new financial penalties for organizations that don't successfully prevent 30-day readmissions for patients with certain medical conditions, and organizations are always looking for new strategies to ensure patients are successfully able to move to the next level of care.
