Connie, the manager of a case management department, was responsible for the patient discharge transportation budget for patients who did not have a ride home from the hospital. Her role covered all medical-surgical units, but not the postacute recovery room (PACU). However, when she received a desperate call from one of the PACU staff nurses, requesting assistance with a patient who did not have a ride home, she agreed to help. Connie viewed her case management department as being service-oriented and inclusive of all patients, even those beyond her assignment.
When Spencer Johnson wrote the iconic book, Who Moved My Cheese? An A-Mazing Way to Deal With Change in Your Work and in Your Life, he probably didn’t have the homecare industry in mind. But with the speed of reimbursement and regulatory issues surrounding us today, he certainly could have.
In recent years, the federal government has been pushing hospitals to help their patients self-manage chronic conditions. If patients and families aren’t able to sufficiently self-manage their conditions within 30 days of discharge, hospitals may incur reimbursement penalties when these patients are readmitted or need to come back to the emergency department, says Karen Zander, RN, MS, CMAC, FAAN,president and CEO of The Center for Case Management, Inc., in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Undiagnosed depression affects a third of hospitalized patients and may interfere with their recovery, says a study published in the February issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine. It may also mean patients have a higher chance of experiencing an avoidable hospital readmission, because they are less likely to take medications as directed and more likely to miss outpatient appointments.
Below is information from the National Institute of Mental Health outlining the signs and symptoms of depression and how the condition might manifest differently in different patients. The complete guide on depression is available online.
CMS auditors may start to look the other way when it comes to enforcing the 96-hour certification requirement this fall. That’s according to the 2018 proposed IPPS rule, which could be beneficial for critical access hospitals (CAH).
Mary, a medical case manager, was comforting Susan, the daughter of one of her patients, who was distressed because her mother was hospitalized with a broken hip. Susan, an only child, was the primary caregiver for both her parents. After visiting her mother in the hospital, Susan would run home to provide evening care for her father, who had a home-care technician during the day.
The ED will soon no longer serve as the welcome mat for the community because the role of the entire hospital in the continuum of healthcare services is going through rapid transformation.
There is little doubt that food plays a crucial role in health, but eating habits are often treated as a lifestyle, not a medical issue. That recently changed in Pennsylvania when a group of hospitals banded together to pilot a new program, The Healthy Food Access Pilot, which strives to help at-risk patients eat well in an effort to improve health outcomes.
