How to Leave a Hospital
With a checklist, of course:
Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, one of the first hospitals to use the Boost program, has reduced 30-day readmissions for patients under 70 years old to 3.97 percent, from 13.05 percent. Readmissions of older patients have fallen to 11.17 percent, from 15.9 percent.
“The program has been a thing of great beauty,” said Dr. Matthew J. Schreiber, chief medical officer of the hospital.
Everybody needs a checklist. Even for grocery shopping.
I never go to a doctor’s appointment without a written checklist of my questions. Have you ever left the appointment and suddenly remembered what you forgot to ask? Those follow up phone calls are a time-consuming, frustrating pain. Better to write it down in the first place.
I once worked in a hospital that cared for critically ill patients, who required lengths of stay longer than Medicare would typically reimburse for. From the start of the admission process, before the patient was actually admitted, the discharge planner would participate in the admission process to determine if the prospective patient had somewhere to discharge to (i.e. so we would not be stuck caring for a patient for weeks — sometimes months).
Hospitals work very hard to get Medicare patients out the door because DRG payments only reimburse for the average length of stay – not an extended length of stay. Hospitals don’t work as hard to keep patients out of the hospital because readmissions pay far better than holding patient longer than average.
The question is: Where do you find the checklist that you need at the time of discharge?
Good question, Vicki. I think patients should have their own checklist, in addition to any checklist the hospital might prepare for them. The theory is that the hospital’s interest and the patient’s interests are not the same.