Home Caregiver Engagement Pivotal in Patients’ Care Transitions
Several earlier studies have shown negative impacts on adults with chronic conditions during healthcare transitions. About 26% of these patients experience emergency department visits, 18% experience rehospitalizations, 66% experience adverse drug events, and 81% experience medication discrepancies.
Top Hospitals Recognized for Consumer Loyalty, Patient Experience Excellence
NRC Health, a national consumer research corporation, announced the winners of its annual consumer loyalty and patient experience awards this week. Each year, the organization conducts surveys and gathers data on net promoter scores (NPS) to pick the winners of the Consumer Loyalty Awards and the Excellence in Patient Experience Awards (formerly known as the Excellence Awards).
USC Launches New Health Systems Management Engineering Program
This unique program offered by the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at USC Viterbi, aims to move graduates to the forefront of healthcare innovation and create new career paths. Professionals will have the opportunity to re-imagine or re-engineer how healthcare can be delivered more efficiently and learn how better patient outcomes can be achieved.
PSQH: The Podcast Episode 59 – Increasing the Adoption of Advance Directives
On episode 59 of PSQH: The Podcast, Michael Cousins, Chief Analytics Officer at Lumeris, talks about efforts to increase the adoption of advance directives.
Partnership Successful at Weaning Patients Off Ventilators
Ventilator-dependent patients are medically complex and often have multiple morbidities. Providing care for these patients is costly, and they have extended lengths of stay compared to many hospitalized patients. In a partnership with Boca Raton, Florida-based Special Care Unit, Tampa General Hospital operates a Progressive Care Unit to wean patients off ventilators.
Follow 7 Principles for Disease and Risk Factor Screening in Emergency Departments
There is a tremendous opportunity to conduct screening in emergency departments. Research has shown that about half of U.S. adults over age 35 have not received screening for common health risk factors such as tobacco use and depression. The new journal article, which was published by Annals of Emergency Medicine, identifies seven principles for conducting disease and health risk screening in emergency departments.
Rural Hospitals Use New Technology to Efficiently Manage Beds and Transfers
At Rice County District Hospital in Lyons, Kansas, staff are using patient placement technology to coordinate care for both patients inside the 25-bed, level 4 hospital, and those needing to be transferred to another facility. The platform integrates local EMS and other transport services, such as helicopters and planes, with health systems hundreds of miles away who have the specialists necessary to treat a critically injured patient.
Leapfrog Makes Recommendations to Reduce Diagnostic Errors at Hospitals
Leapfrog, which is a nonprofit organization founded in 2000 to promote patient safety, identified 300 potential practices that hospitals could adopt to reduce diagnostic errors. The potential practices were pared down to a list of 29 recommended practices in two categories— Organizational Leadership & Systems and the Diagnostic Process. There are 16 recommendations in the Organizational Leadership & Systems category and 13 recommendations in the Diagnostic Process category.
Using Technology to Improve Observation Rates and Drive Appropriate Admissions
The suburban Philadelphia healthcare network, centered around an independent 270-bed hospital, is using predictive analytics technology from XSOLIS to improve medical utilization management. In the first six months of use, officials say they’ve improved observation rates by 20% and observation to inpatient conversion rates by 37%. And three years later, the initial return on investment of 4.6x has now improved to 7.3x.
CMS Revises Methodology for Calculating Staffing Star Rating
These measures, which have been posted on the CMS website for more than a decade, are used to calculate each nursing home’s star rating for the staffing section of the Nursing Home Five-Star Quality Rating System.