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The emergency department at Middle Tennessee Medical Center (MTMC) in Murfreesboro certainly qualifies as busy: It sees nearly 63,000 patients a year and averages more than 170 patients a day. Yet the average time it takes a patient to get to triage from entry into the ED is 14-17 minutes, and its door-to-doc time averages 35-40 minutes.
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Before developing a protocol that delegates authority for determining patient status to case managers, a multidisciplinary team at Good Samaritan Hospital in Dayton, OH, spent several months researching the process, seeking advice from the Florida Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) and hospitals in Florida that had piloted a case management admission status protocol.
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When hospitals rely on a patient's family members to interpret medical news, they might be placing the patient at risk, an expert says.
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Sometimes the best response to regulatory and payer changes in health care is to improve the discharge planning process.
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Faced with capacity challenges, the case management department at Harris Methodist Hospital in Ft. Worth, TX, is collaborating with representatives from local long-term acute care hospitals (LTACs) to develop ways to improve transitions of care from one facility to another.
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A series of initiatives, including automatic triggers for quality measures in the hospital's electronic medical record and concurrent review by case managers for core measures, has resulted in significant increases in quality measure scores at Russellville (AL) Hospital, a 100-bed facility.
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MLN Matters, published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), provides clarification about the Privacy Rule of HIPAA, when transferring private health information to potential post-acute providers:
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For professionals working in health care, it is easy to quickly become accustomed to the various presentations and stressors that accompany a patient who requires hospitalization. In fact, our efficient functioning is dependent on this to some degree.
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Proposed state laws in Nevada in the wake of a highly publicized hepatitis C outbreak in Las Vegas include proposals to hire infection preventionists (IPs) as consultants to oversee practice in freestanding clinics.
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When the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) unveiled the new MS-DRG reimbursement system in 2007, a data analysis projected that Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center was likely to lose about $500,000 with the new system, based on the hospital's 2006 data.