Hospitals are desperate for your help. Next October, Medicare will begin to penalize hospitals that do not bring their patient readmission rates under control. Fines will start at 1% of a hospital’s annual Medicare payments and rise every year until readmissions decline. Hence, hospital administrators will be open to any and all suggestions. Home health care providers are in a key position to help.
This was the message delivered to a standing-room-only audience during the annual Southwest Regional home health care conference, “Catching the Dream of Home Care,” held last week in Albuquerque. The presenter, Scott Flowers, is a project director for EQ Health Solutions, the Medicare QIO for Louisiana. (more…)
The research is nearly 10 years old but still valid. Shaving a day or two off the end of a hospital stay saves only about 5% of the cost of admission. This is because most of the costs are incurred at the beginning of an admission. Whether hospitalization occurs due to scheduled or emergency surgery, via the emergency department or for non-emergency, non-surgical reasons, most of the expense accrues during the first days. (more…)
A comprehensive new report provides nine hospital recidivism success stories about inter-agency collaboration projects in nine different regions. We found two that include home health care agencies using advanced technology as their projects’ center pins. This week, a home care agency, hospital and senior clinic in Denver worked together to reduce 30-day readmissions from 20% to 13% and 60-day readmissions by 50% compared to uncoached patients. Here is how they did it. (more…)
We confront home care and hospice’s toughest problems through five topical newsletters.
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Do you have a program that is helping to limit re-hospitalizations? We want to hear from you.
We would like to hear about it. This is the place to tell your stories about a home care patient’s return to the hospital, especially one that you were powerless to prevent.
I have heard stories about patients being hospitalized for reasons that were completely beyond the control of their home care provider, sometimes completely unnecessary. But the provider is dinged for it anyway.
I want to hear these stories, publish them, use them to increase the industry’s insight and awareness and help everyone out. Naturally, we need you to leave out your name and everything that might identify your patient. Address your story to tim@homecareful.com.
In coming issues, we will expand on this service to include other stories. The more the experience shocked you, the more helpful it will be to tell it to the entire industry.
- Have you had medications stolen from your patients?
- Have you had patients neglected?
- Have you had family members do insane things?
- Have you had physicians who wanted to increase hospital census?
- Have you had physicians ignore your warnings?
- Have you had hospitals discharge inappropriate patients?
All of these things, and worse, are happening to patients every day. We need your help to compile a list of the ways in which others make it difficult for you to do what you do best, care for patients.
CMS and government planners might not get around to your neck of the woods very often. Sometimes it seems as though the only way they know what you do is through cold, raw numbers. By cataloging the hospitalization reasons you experience every day, perhaps someone in Washington or Baltimore will understand your world better as they calculate your outcomes.
The door to the Homecareful website is open. Use it! Tell Tim about a few of your hospitalizations that were going to happen no matter what you did. We are all in this together.
