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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Nana Adabie was a relatively new nurse when Arthur was admitted to Kindred Transitional Care and Rehabilitation -- Lawton in San Francisco. Arthur was under her care while he recovered from a below-the-knee amputation as well as from an infection he had incurred. As it would turn out, while Nana was helping Arthur recover and gain strength to go home, Arthur was helping Nana grow as a nurse, and gain confidence.

"I had been working here for a few months as a brand new nurse... but Arthur still managed to make me feel like a very great nurse," Nana recollected. "He was so positive in everything that he did. So positive, that I felt like his energy flowed throughout the whole facility."

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Imagine a world where a patient is able to access pre acute care rather than just post acute care; a world where there is a more central role for post acute care. At the end of the 2015 Clinical Impact Symposium's second full day, the clinicians were treated to a dinner where William Altman, Executive Vice President for Strategy, Policy and Integrated Care provided insights into Kindred's current position in the world, as well as where we are headed.

Altman spoke to how we, as a company, are figuring out how to reposition ourselves in this new world, where healthcare is patient-centric.

"I don't know what is going to happen," Altman said. "But I do know that our country has reached a tipping point when it comes to integrated care."

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It's quite common for older adults to experience falls or to limit their activities because they are afraid of falling, but we shouldn't just accept falling as a normal part of aging, according to Jane Painter-Patton, Ed.D, a professor at East Carolina University's College of Allied Health Sciences in the Occupational Therapy Department.

In her presentation Wednesday at the Kindred 2015 Clinical Impact Symposium, Painter-Patton gave tips to clinicians and encouraged them to work as a team with other specialists as they deal with the complex issues relating to falls in older adults.

Despite addressing large audiences, both Painter-Patton's presentation and the reaction panel discussion that followed felt very much like advice one clinician might give to a colleague, one-on-one. The participants weren't just speaking at the audience or discussing abstracts, they were speaking directly to every clinician in the room, giving practical, actionable advice that could be implemented successfully in the real world. 

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James Poullard, Vice President of Pharmacy and Laboratory Services for Kindred, led a reaction panel on Medication Management and Polypharmacy, following Justin Kullgren's, PharmD, CPE presentation on the subject. In addition to Kullgren, panelists included Sally Brooks, MD, Chief Medical Officer for RehabCare, Kim Ramos, RN, Care Transitions Manager for the Hospital Division and Jill Wesolowski, RPh, PharmD, Clinical Staff Pharmacist for Kindred Hospitals of Cleveland.

Poullard started the panel by defining its purpose, which was "to assemble a panel of professionals who are in the trenches, to help us deal with these challenges of transitioning patients from our short-term acute care referral sources to our LTACs, and then preparing those individuals for discharge to nursing homes or to home care settings, and discussing really what their experiences have been."

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The U.S. Senate Finance Committee recently established a dedicated Chronic Care Work Group in order to develop legislative solutions to improve care for Medicare beneficiaries living with chronic conditions. In order to guide and inform their efforts, the Committee reached out to stakeholders in order to seek recommendations, examples of real world experience and thoughtful discourse in order to help improve care for this vulnerable patient population. Kindred responded to the opportunity and submitted a response to the Chronic Care Work Group.

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Larry Wolf, Kindred’s Health Information Technology Strategist, spoke at the
Larry addressed the importance of information technology as one component for improving care. He reviewed the changes over the past few years that have resulted in widespread adoption of electronic health records and the beginnings of their use to improve care coordination. Looking to the future, he discussed the opportunity created by the IMPACT Act of 2014 which will require interoperable information in a few key areas that include functional and cognitive status, medications and care preferences. Read Full Post

During the introduction for Sean Muldoon, MD the Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer for Kindred Healthcare’s Hospital Division, the audience got a hint of the difficulty involved when it was noted that Muldoon was given the choice of solving world hunger or getting three key metrics measured the same way in all Kindred facilities. Solving world hunger, it was noted, would be the easier task.

 

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NOTE: Mary's story is purely hypothetical and was crafted specifically for 2014 Clinical Impact Symposium attendees to use as an exercise in care transitions. Any resemblance to a person living or deceased is coincidental.  

Throughout the 2014 Kindred Clinical Impact Symposium: Clinical Excellence in the Care of the Stroke Patient Across the Continuum, participants were asked to consider the fictional case of Mary Marton, a 66-year-old woman who had been the primary caregiver for her debilitated husband, Jack, until she herself suffered a stroke. Participants broke into small groups yesterday to talk about some of the lessons learned through the care Mary received after a friend called 911 when she noted Mary’s speech was slurred and that she was having trouble picking things up off the table.

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