"Are you providing truly patient-centered care? Or are your patients just sitting in the middle as you and your staff gather around and try to determine what's best for them? In a 2008 article from the FPM archives, Douglas Eby, MD, Kathleen Gottlieb, and Ileen Sylvester discuss how they changed their health system so that everything their patients define as "needs, goals, and values become the system's focus," leading to improved physician-patient relationships and outcomes. For more information visit the Patient-Centered Care 

"Being discharged from the hospital can be dangerous. A classic study found that nearly 20% of patients experience adverse events within 3 weeks of discharge, nearly three-quarters of which could have been prevented or ameliorated. Adverse drug events are the most common post-discharge complication, with hospital-acquired infections and procedural complications also causing considerable morbidity." Read more...  

"Several Utah hospitals, home health agencies, and skilled nursing facilities have engaged in a partnership with HealthInsight, the Medicare Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) in Utah, to provide "verbal reports" between healthcare facilities at transitions of care. Transitions of care are a known area of concern and problems with the transition are a contributing factor to hospital readmission." Read more...  

We suggest, based on critical appraisal of the relevant literature and our experience in the field, that 5 "best practice" principles can be applied to minimize the up-front financial investment and help overcome organizational barriers, increasing the likelihood of success in reducing readmissions.  

Those principles are as follows: 

1. Match the intensity of the readmission reduction intervention to the patient's risk of readmission.
2. Avoid commonly used interventions that have not been shown to be effective.
3. Use interventions with a lasting effect.
4. Create an effective team before implementation of any intervention.
5. Broaden the intervention to target high-risk groups for readmission who have not been the focus of previous readmission reduction efforts.  Read more...