Background
Hospitals now face financial penalties when patients are readmitted and it’s deemed to be an “avoidable admission.” Many patients discharged after a hospital admission, are readmitted due to many situations. Many readmissions are avoidable and create opportunities to improve and better coordinate care for the patient. Hospitalizations are an expensive and ineffective form of managing health care and often cause further deterioration of a patient’s health status, including safety and infection risks. Reducing avoidable hospital readmissions leads to improving quality, reducing unnecessary health care costs, and promoting patient-centered care.
Our Approach
Being prospective and creative is the key. There are basic steps to achieve process improvement and one critical element is to develop a systemic team approach to reach the desired goals and outcomes. Although there are challenges in our health care delivery system, interventions to address readmissions would include:
- An assessment of current practices
- Develop baseline dataset for admission and readmission causes
- Develop a multidisciplinary team with appropriate stakeholders
- Institute a Community-Based Case Management Program ®
- Develop processes to address the reasons for readmissions
- Implement and follow-up to determine realization of goals
Our goal is to provide our clients with quality services to address issues that affect how patients are managed in the health care climate and improve the effectiveness of hospital and community systems.
