Chicago's Mount Sinai Hospital recently embarked on reducing readmissions with the Project Re-Engineered Discharge model, otherwise known as Project RED, and discovered some early successes, Leslie Zun, chair and professor of the emergency department, said at Friday's World Congress 3rd Annual Leadership Summit on Hospital Readmissions in Falls Church, Va.
Program leaders found the program lowered readmissions from 34 (from July 2010 to January 2011) to five (from February 2011 to July 2011). Implementing Project RED did not require new staff or additional dollars at Mount Sinai, according to the Web site FierceHealthcare.com.
A large majority of adverse events experienced by Medicare patients in the hospital setting may not be reported, according to a study released last week by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Office of the Inspector General.
The report (synopsis – full text) found hospital incident reporting systems captured only an estimated 14 percent of patient harm events experienced by Medicare beneficiaries. Almost two-thirds of the events (61 percent) were not perceived as reportable by staff.
Among other recommendations, the OIG suggested that AHRQ and CMS work together to create a list of reportable events and provide technical assistance to hospitals using the list.
Specifically, the findings are based on a study of Medicare beneficiaries discharged from 195 acute care hospitals in 2008.
On Dec. 9, News-Medical.net reported that few U.S. hospitals are working to prevent the most common hospital-acquired infection (HAI), catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs), according to a study published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. The University of Michigan Health System and Veterans Affairs Ann Arbor Healthcare Center study found that nearly 90 percent of hospitals increased use of methods to prevent central line-associated bloodstream infections and ventilator-associated pneumonia between 2005 and 2009. However, only a small number of hospitals regularly used prevention practices for CAUTIs. “Despite being the most common healthcare-associated infection in the country, hospitals appear not to be using as many practices for prevention when compared with bloodstream infections and ventilator-associated pneumonia,” said senior author Dr. Sanjay Saint. Read more.
According to a Dec. 7 InformationWeek article, a group of physician health information technology (IT) leaders has launched a nonprofit website called “Doctors Helping Doctors Transform Health Care,” which is designed to serve as a portal for physicians to share ideas about their problems and solutions in implementing electronic health records (EHRs). The site’s goal is to have doctors share inspirational stories, talk about how health IT affects front-line medicine, and help one another make the transformation to EHRs effectively. The website could also help physicians achieve Meaningful Use and improve patient care. Read more.
The most common hospital-acquired infection, Clostridium Difficile, may signficantly prolong hospital stays, according to multiple reports published earlier this month.
Previous studies had found healthcare-acquired infections can prolong stay time by an average of six days. But a recent Canadian Medical Association Journal study examined hospital admissions between 2002 and 2009 and found that 1,393 of 136,877 patients contracted C. difficile. Those patients that were infected by C. difficile spent 34 days in the hospital compared with eight days for patients who were not infected. Led by Dr. Alan Forster of the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, the study concluded that “hospital-acquired C. difficile significantly and independently prolongs the duration of a patient’s stay in the hospital.”
The findings were recently reported by ThirdAge.com.
National Influenza Vaccination Week, which began yesterday, presents a great opportunity for healthcare providers to educate seniors and others with Medicare that a flu vaccine is the first and best way to prevent influenza. Moreover, these vaccinations are particularly important for people at higher risk of serious flu complications.
It is also a great time to inform those with Medicare about other preventive services covered by Medicare that may be appropriate for them. Under Medicare's Preventive Services benefits, for example, beneficiaries receive at least one covered vaccination each flu season. (Note: While the flu vaccine plus its administration are covered under Medicare Part B, the vaccine itself is not a Part-D covered drug)
Rural communities face accessibility issues, a lack of healthcare providers, growing percentages of underinsured citizens and other unique challenges.
That's one of the reasons why many healthcare providers and organizations are observing National Rural Health Day.
Missouri in particularly is highly rural -- almost 90 percent of the state's land is in a rural area. Almost 2 in 5 Missourians -- 2.2 million people -- live in these areas. Each has differing access to healthcare facilities.
To raise awareness of the need for rural healthcare, the State Offices of Rural Health and the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services teamed up to published a toolkit and Web site.
Medicare patients suffering from heart failure were hospitalized less in 2008 than they were a decade before, according to an article published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Mortality rates for heart-failure patients on Medicare also declined slightly, but remain high, according to the authors.
A study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine showed that many Americans hold mistaken beliefs about the meaning of FDA approval. In a test involving control groups and two experimental groups -- each given differing levels of explanation about their medicines -- showed that both simple directive and nondirective explanations helped more people choose the “right” drug (defined in the study’s outcomes as the one with proven patient outcomes and the one with a longer track record). At all educational levels, both explanations resulted in about the same increased rate of the correct choice. The understanding of the implications of FDA approval, however, did improve with educational level.
The authors note that this study was nested in a broader study about the effect of different ways of presenting risk information to patients (i.e., 1 percent vs. 1 in 100). They conclude, based on the results of this study, that “explanations about surrogate outcomes and new drugs should appear prominently in the professional label, patient information, and direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertisements.” They also offer some possible ways to strengthen the phrasing of the explanations, and note that even though the explanations result in better choices, “almost one-third of participants still chose a drug with only a surrogate benefit over one with a patient benefit, and nearly half still chose a new drug over an equally effective older drug.”
Read the abstract of the study, or purchase a single-day usage license of the full article.
Eight Missouri hospitals have been named top performers on key quality measures by The Joint Commission, a leading accreditor of healthcare organizations in the United States.
The Missouri hospitals were among 405 hospitals nationwide to earn that distinction. Inclusion on the list is based on accountability measure data reported to The Joint Commission during 2010.
Each hospital evaluated was ranked on five categories – heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, surgical and children's asthma.
2010 Top Performers on Key Quality Measures in Missouri include:
Research Belton Hospital (pneumonia, surgical)
St. Mary’s Health Center (heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, surgical)
SSM St. Joseph Hospital West (heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, surgical)
Lee’s Summit Medical Center (heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, surgical)
Lafayette Regional Health Center (pneumonia)
St. Francis Hospital and Health Services (pneumonia, surgical)
Poplar Bluff Regional Medical Center, LLC (heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, children’s asthma)
Heartland Regional Medical Center (heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, surgical)
October 7, 2011
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Rural communities face accessibility issues, a lack of healthcare providers, growing percentages of underinsured citizens and other unique challenges.
