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Website spotlight: Nurse practitioners improve discharges, reduce readmissions, and save hospitals money

Staff Development Weekly: Insight on Evidence-Based Practice in Education, February 3, 2012

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Case study from Loyola University Medical Center

A recent study from Loyola University Medical Center illustrates how adding a nurse practitioner (NP) to a medical or surgical department can improve patient discharges, reduce unnecessary readmissions through the ED, and save hospitals money.

The study found that  although the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education's resident duty hour restrictions have reduced resident fatigue, they have negatively affected continuity of patient care. When residents are required to go home after working their prescribed 80 hours, someone has to follow patients to ensure they are discharged properly, and that is where NPs come in.

By ensuring that patients and family members have all of the information and instructions they need to care for themselves at home, NPs can prevent those patients from presenting in the ED days later with simple complications. Reducing the number of ED visits and readmissions saves hospitals money, and who can argue with that, especially when Medicare plans to stop reimbursing hospitals for readmissions within 30 days starting in 2012?

Study results at a glance

The Loyola University Medical Center study focused on a surgical oncology department in Maywood, IL, that consisted of three surgical attendings. The attendings hired an NP to coordinate discharge plans and communicate with patients after discharge. The study retrospectively reviewed 826 patient charts that were separated into two groups: before and after the NP was hired. The chart review focused on discharges and whether the patients returned to the ED unnecessarily (an unnecessary ED visit was defined as one that did not result in an inpatient admission).

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Editor's note: To read more articles like this, visit the Reading Room, part of www.StrategiesForNurseManagers.com.
 

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