Helping others recognize the signs of a stroke can shorten the time before a person gets treatment, and faster medical treatment can minimize long-term effects or prevent death.

It is widely recognized by policymakers and payers that our nation’s healthcare system is fragmented, creating gaps in care for patients. Researchers believe that part of this fragmentation is a result of the separate payments furnished by Medicare for each provider type that a patient may encounter during a single care episode.

What is an Accountable Care Organization (ACO)?

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) broadly defines ACOs as “groups of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers, who come together voluntarily to give coordinated high quality care to their Medicare patients.” The ultimate goal of this care coordination is to streamline services and ensure that patients get the right care at the right time with better clinical outcomes. A secondary goal is to create savings to the Medicare program by eliminating duplicate services, medical errors and preventable rehospitalizations.

The typical stay at a traditional hospital is five days. At Kindred Transitional Care Hospitals, the length of stay may be measured in weeks, not days. Why? Because we know that not all patients can recover in five days or less. Some have underlying conditions that make illnesses or other conditions harder to treat. Others are still too ill to return home.

At Kindred Hospitals, we offer a range of services to help patients who need additional time to recover, and the length of the stay depends on the needs of the patient. This includes the specialized services of our Subacute Units, where we work with patients who have an acute illness or injury or worsening of a disease but no longer need the aggressive level of care provided in a hospital. We offer short-term comprehensive inpatient medical care and rehabilitation that is designed to get the patient home or to a facility such as a skilled nursing center.

Terah Hatter can sum up her job in one word – amazing. Her job, she says, “is about caring.”

“It’s an honor to walk beside the patient and family to help them through a difficult time,” says Hatter, LMSW, a social worker for, which is an affiliate of Kindred at Home and an agency that provides home health, hospice and private duty nursing care in Texas.

An individualized care plan is critical when helping brain injury patients recover and return home. And it takes a team of specialists to tailor the rehabilitation plan so it addresses both the physical, cognitive, and emotional issues involved.

The brain injury program at Kindred’s Inpatient Rehabilitation Hospitals focuses on helping patients restore function and learn how to do things differently when functions can’t be restored to pre-injury levels. The program combines a multidisciplinary team with the technologies and tools specifically geared toward brain injuries.

In addition to physician specialists, Kindred’s brain injury team includes rehabilitation trained nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, clinical dietitians, neuropsychologists, orthotists, social workers and case managers. The therapists often have extensive training in areas such as Neuro-IFRAH, Neurodevelopmental technique, Vital Stim, and more.

Did you know that every fourth Tuesday of every March is The American Diabetes Association Alert Day? Diabetes is an epidemic and is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States. Over 25 million children and adults in the United States or 8.3% of the population have diabetes. Approximately 7 million people are unaware that they have diabetes and go undiagnosed. As a result, on Tuesday, March 25, 2014, The American Diabetes Association is “Alerting” the public to this chronic disease and is asking everyone to take the Diabetes Risk Test to find out if you are at risk for developing type 2 diabetes.

You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but Sally Meilun who has worked at Kindred Healthcare for nearly 23 years, has heart disease.

When you talk to Sally, it’s clear that a healthy lifestyle is important to her. She’s always been active, and she still is, but when she was in her 40s, she was diagnosed with aortic valve disease, a condition in which the valve between the left ventricle and the aorta doesn’t work properly.

“When you have heart disease, it’s not always obvious,” says Sally, who works as the Director of Travel and Relocation at Kindred’s Support Center in Louisville, Kentucky.

Just as there are different kinds of patients, there are different kinds of hospitals. Kindred Transitional Care Hospitals provide a wide range of services to help patients with complex medical issues who need additional recovery time after a stay at a traditional hospital. While every patient receives individualized care from a team of healthcare professionals, our goal is for each person to reach the highest level of recovery before discharge.

With our Direct Admit Program, physicians can admit medically complex patients from short-term acute care hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, home health and other service providers directly to a Kindred Hospital. We work directly with physicians to make sure their patients have a smooth transition into our hospitals and the highest level of care continuity to prevent future readmissions.