David and his wife, Linducia, were visiting a friend in Las Vegas. When they returned to their hotel she noticed his breathing didn't seem right. This is his story.

"It wasn't long after we got back to our hotel that David began having trouble breathing. I called the front desk and the paramedics arrived very quickly" Linducia said. "He was rushed to the hospital and we later found out it was only a matter of minutes before he would have died from a heart attack. He had emergency heart surgery and had three stents put in. During the surgery he also suffered from three strokes and his doctors had to induce a coma."

After surgery his outlook was very poor. David also began suffering from massive kidney failure and had to have dialysis. "His condition actually worsened" Linducia recalled. "He was on every kind of medication imaginable, completely unconscious and immobile. None of the doctors thought he would survive. Then four weeks into this ordeal I asked his doctors to run an MRI brain scan as he had said that if he was ever brain dead he wouldn't want to 'live' hooked up to a machine."

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With Room Service and More, Hospitals Borrow From Hotels

At the Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital outside Detroit, patients arrive to uniformed valets and professional greeters. Read More  

Remote Heart Monitoring Can Help Detect Emergencies

Instead of having heart monitors with noisy alarms near patients' beds in the hospital, it might be better to have off-site technicians do the heart monitoring remotely, a recent study suggests. Read More   

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Adrienne Boissy, MD, MA, is the Medical Director for the Center of Excellence in Healthcare Communication at the Cleveland Clinic. She and her team have created a comprehensive program to strengthen physician and provider communication skills throughout the Cleveland Clinic and have trained more than 4,000 staff physicians and house staff to date.

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The most common hospital setting in America is one that provides short-term acute care for patients with pressing health issues – emergencies brought on by an acute illness or an accident. The immediate objective is to stabilize patients and help them recover as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, not all patients can recover quickly. They need a transitional care hospital.

 

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Reducing Rehospitalizations: What to Focus on Next
Here is a mini-roadmap on what to focus on next for this important initiative. Reducing rehospitalizations is the right thing to do for patient care – we all know this. But with task forces on performance improvement initiatives ranging from infections to patient satisfaction, it can be difficult to know where to focus efforts for the greatest impact. Read Full Post

Patients, their family members and friends are often overwhelmed during care transitions so we have compiled some frequently asked questions about our transitional care hospitals. Whether you are a patient, loved one or healthcare professional, here are a few things about our transitional care hospitals you should know: Read Full Post

At Kindred we understand that when people are discharged from a traditional hospital, they often need continued care in order to recover completely. That’s where our Transitional Care Hospitals come in.

Many medically-complex patients benefit from extended recovery time. Our patients receive that much needed care through treatment delivered according to their individual needs. Our physicians see patients daily to assure the best outcomes possible. Our goal is to help each patient reach the highest level of recovery before being discharged.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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