What can you really do about readmission rates?
Patient Safety Monitor, February 28, 2017
This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Patient Safety Monitor.
Editor’s note: Janet Spiegel, MS, is a management consultant who has worked with several payer and provider organizations. She is currently a Lean senior strategic performance advisor at Martin’s Point Health Care in Portland, Maine.
When a healthcare leader charges a person or a team to solve some of the biggest national problems in care delivery—such as reducing hospital readmission rates—two things often occur: a surge of passion to make meaningful change, followed quickly by a sense of paralysis regarding where to start. But challenges, even massive ones like these, can be successfully addressed through a targeted problem-solving framework.
Define the problem
Reach out to your informatics/IT/data analytics team and let them know that you will need a partner for this effort. To start, ask for a report on your facility’s top 10 reasons for readmission. Using the Pareto Principle, you’ll likely see that 80% of the effects are caused by 20% of the causes. Let’s say your top two reasons for readmission are heart failure and COPD. Those are really big issues, so keep digging.
Go back to your data partners and ask for an analysis of readmissions due to heart failure and COPD in the last 12 months by patient age. What do you see first in the heart failure report? Are 80% of the readmitted patients over 60, for example? If so, ask your analyst what the patients were admitted for to begin with, or perhaps what counties those patients live in. Ask your analyst for his or her expert opinion on other data points worth analyzing. Keep asking questions about your results. This is called cause mapping: We want to keep asking what the causes are for the results so we can solve specific problems.
This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Patient Safety Monitor.
Related Products
-
Patient Safety Monitor
Patient Safety Monitor is a searchable, web-based crosswalk that organizes state, CMS, and Joint Commission requirements by...
-
Patient Safety Monitor Insider
This e-mail newsletter provides healthcare professionals with the latest patient safety news, while offering useful...
-
Patient Safety Monitor - 1 Year Electronic
Patient Safety Monitor is a searchable, web-based crosswalk that organizes state, CMS, and Joint Commission requirements by...
-
Patient Safety Monitor - 1 Year Print and Electronic
Patient Safety Monitor is a searchable, web-based crosswalk that organizes state, CMS, and Joint Commission requirements by...
-
Patient Safety Monitor - 2 Year Electronic
Patient Safety Monitor is a searchable, web-based crosswalk that organizes state, CMS, and Joint Commission requirements by...
Most Popular
- Articles
-
- Practice the six rights of medication administration
- Note similarities and differences between HCPCS, CPT® codes
- Differentiate between types of wound debridement
- What to include on the incident report
- OB services: Coding inside and outside of the package
- Q&A: Primary, principal, and secondary diagnoses
- Don’t forget the three checks in medication administration
- Know guidelines and subtle differences in code descriptions for laceration repairs
- Code diagnoses and outpatient treatment for PTSD
- What does case-mix index mean to you?
- E-mailed
-
- Director's Note: Use case-mix index metrics with caution
- Know the medical gas cylinder storage requirements
- Learn how to read an OP report
- Injections and infusions continue to confuse coders
- Hourly rounding improves patient safety, reduces call-light use
- Ensure coding accuracy by following rules for selecting a principal diagnosis
- Combating racism in healthcare
- Clearing up 2-midnight rule confusion
- Choose wisely when selecting a nurse preceptor
- Bill and charge for supplies correctly to reduce risk and minimize lost revenue
- Searched
