Geriatric patients with frequent emergency department (ED) use are more likely to have comorbidities, be admitted or transferred, and visit three or more hospitals in a year than less frequent ED users, a recently published study in the Annals of Emergency Medicine found.
Health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions, and the total cost of limited health literacy to the U.S. healthcare system is estimated at $50–73 billion.
On January 8, CMS released MLN Matters SE19002 on status determinations for total knee arthroplasty, which included guidance on how to determine proper status for patients undergoing the procedure, but CMS quickly rescinded it and announced that it is making revisions and will reissue it in the near future.
Data is an essential tool in understanding the patient population that will guide the focus of your program. Both internal metrics and community/public health data will provide strategic focus to case management practices.
In this month's complex case, a case manager deals with a challenging patient who arrives in the emergency department on Friday afternoon, the same day he was supposed to be discharged from his skilled nursing facility.
Q: Case management requires a lot of communication with patients. What happens when communication can’t happen because of a patient’s temporary or permanent condition?
