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CMW Sneak Peek: Preadmission interventions can help improve LOS

Case Management Weekly, December 3, 2008

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Case management department employees will hear the familiar phrase “We need to decrease LOS” many times in their careers. Frontline case managers have many hurdles before them as they try to manage LOS; creating a model that breaks your facility’s LOS plan into achievable, smaller goals can be a helpful and proactive solution.

When thinking about how to break down your LOS plan, a good place to start is with preadmission interventions. Preadmission interventions include:

• Partner with surgery clinics to assist patients in pre-planning for their discharge from scheduled surgeries. A way to do this would be collaborating with your orthopedic clinics to create handouts for patients, which assist them in thinking about their anticipated discharge needs, discusses how to evaluate or choose post discharge services, and encourages them to visit and choose post acute facilities prior to admission.
• Collaborate with your perioperative services. Most hip surgery patients are evaluated by the physical therapy staff immediately following surgery. If your physical therapists don’t work on weekends, it makes sense to avoid doing these surgeries on Fridays because it would mean the patient may not be seen until Monday. This would unnecessarily increase their length of stay.
• Identify high-risk patients and implement pre-admission patient education. Any patient identified as a home discharge that reveals they have no social support systems should be referred to the medical social worker for pre-surgery intervention.

Check out the November 2008 issue of Case Management Monthly to get the full story, and discover all the benefits of being a Case Management Monthly subscriber!

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