Hospital Case Management articles from December 2004

Hospital Case Management archives from December 2004

Pensacola hospital and patients survive battering by Hurricane Ivan: hospital provided shelter to 2,000 people during the storm.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... It was about 2 a.m., Sept. 16, when Hurricane Ivan roared into Pensacola, FL, with 130-mile-per-hour winds, battering the boarded-up windows of Sacred Heart Hospital, knocking out the electricity and forcing the hospital to operate on emergency...

Prepare your hospital for a very unusual flu season: vaccine shortages may wreak havoc with hospital EDs, absenteeism.
December 1, 2004... With the unprecedented shortage of influenza vaccine this flu season, hospitals are scrambling to prepare for what may be a record number of flu patients presenting to their already overcrowded emergency departments (EDs) and for staff...

Team approach avoids denials and saves millions: work cooperatively with business office, clinics.
December 1, 2004... In 1999, Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas had a denial rate of 1.12% of gross revenue at year end. The denial rate began to decline steadily following the implementation of a denials management team and process improvement teams, both of which...

Get ready for emphasis on quality measures: take a team approach to improve processes.
December 1, 2004... Public reporting of quality measures is likely to increase in the near future, and hospitals should get ready, asserts Carolyn Scott, director of collaborative services and CEO work groups for clinical excellence with VHA Inc., an Irving,...

Simple measures result in big quality improvements: staff reminders, report cards are effective.
December 1, 2004... When it comes to improving quality, sometimes the simplest and least expensive measures work best, reports Earl Kurashige, RN, project manager for Qualis Health, a nonprofit health care quality improvement organization based in Seattle. ...

New care management model cuts LOS, observation days: clerical tasks eliminated for case managers and social workers.(Critical Path Network[TM])
December 1, 2004... Redesigning the care management model and creating a resource center to free the clinical staff from clerical work has resulted in decreases in length of stay and helped drop denials for clinical reasons to zero at St. Vincent's Medical Center...

ED sees 50% reduction in time from triage to ED bed: define problems and then benchmark.(Ambulatory Care Quarterly)
December 1, 2004... (Editor's note: In this first part of a two-part series on benchmarking, we tell about two hospitals that achieved dramatic reductions in length of stay (LOS). Next month, we discuss how to speed up admissions by addressing virtual capacity...

CE questions.
December 1, 2004... This concludes our CE semester. Please fill out the enclosed CE evaluation form and return in the envelope provided. 22. How many patients were at Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola when Hurricane Ivan hit? A. 150 B. 200 C....

How to unjam your discharge bottlenecks: failing to do so means lost revenue.(Guest Column)
December 1, 2004... Are admitted patients being held for a long time in the emergency department while they wait for an inpatient bed to become available? Do patients in specialty care units stay longer than necessary because there is no general unit bed for them...