The Collaborative Forum » Patient Self-care

What Constitutes an Effective Hospital Readmission Program?

Randy Williams — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 22:17:49 +0000

I am sure you have seen the reports, including the 2009 article in the New England Journal of Medicine (Jenks, et al), that highlight the cost and prevalence of 30, 60 and 90 day hospital readmissions. I think it’s safe to say that we all agree that this is a major issue that our healthcare system needs to address.

Where we don’t all agree is how to get there. Organizations across the country are looking for effective initiatives and innovations to reduce these costs. In their quest, some organizations are looking for easy solutions, such as the simple scheduling of follow-up visits post discharge. However, as detailed in a new study from the Mayo Clinic, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, siloed, quick-fix initiatives, while very important, alone will not provide the true behavior change needed for measurable reductions in avoidable hospital admissions and readmissions. (more…)

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Simple Solutions Keep Coming Out on Top

Randy Williams — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:55:44 +0000

Right before Christmas, Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and a prolific writer at The New Yorker who writes about the problems and challenges of modern medicine, published a book titled The Checklist Manifesto–How to get things right.

The gist of the book is that by employing simple checklists in hospitals, procedures are performed with fewer complications and patients get healthier. Gawande has been making the rounds on The Daily Show, PBS’ News Hour with Jim Lehrer, NPR and other media outlets promoting his book and discussing the remarkable success checklists can produce. (more…)

Tags: EHR

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Accountability for Patients and for Care Organizations…

Randy Williams — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:42:30 +0000

Just a few weeks ago, the American Heart Association (AHA) released a scientific statement, State of the Science: Promoting Self-Care in Persons with Heart Failure: A Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association, that discusses the importance of patient self-care (PSC) and provides evidence-based recommendations to clinicians to promote self-care in their heart failure (HF) patients. The AHA placed significant emphasis on teaching patients how to recognize condition symptoms and what to do with that information, how to make appropriate behavior changes and the importance of transitions of care and depression screening. In addition, the statement acknowledged that systems of care, such as care coordination and telehealth, hold promise for improving the self-care abilities of persons with HF.

Clearly, this set of recommendations resonates with us at Pharos Innovations. These recommendations are directly aligned with the paradigm of physician- and patient-centric care coordination that we created with Tel-Assurance^®. The AHA recommendations are all about accountability: the patient’s as well as the physician’s. Accountability brings better results with healthier patients and reduced hospital readmission rates—both which on the face of it, are great things.

Unfortunately, our healthcare delivery system, as currently designed, is not set up to maximize patient and physician accountability. Specifically, in the way healthcare providers are currently incented for the quantity of care, not the quality. The good news is that this is changing. (more…)

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