As clinicians, we go to work every day to provide quality medical care to our patients. And while medical care will always be our number one concern, hospitality is now the second-most important standard in healthcare. The world is evolving, and with it, our hospitals. Many medical facilities are beginning to resemble hotels in varying degrees.

On the surface, and from a business standpoint, it seems simple. Hotel-like amenities can improve health outcomes by reducing stress and cutting down on the transfer of diseases by using private rooms. This patient-centered environment helps patients focus on getting better, which leads to decreased lengths-of-stay and readmissions. 

AHA Urges Congress to Remove Legal Barriers to Value-Based Payment Arrangements

Congress should adopt a single broad exception to federal fraud and abuse laws for financial relationships designed to foster collaboration, efficiencies and improvements in health care, AHA told leaders of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means committees today. Read More   

How a New Payment Stream Could Come to Senior Care

As baby boomers age over the next several decades, the demand for senior care options will increase-and there currently are limited ways for middle-income earners to pay for these services. Read More  

As part of an ongoing effort to provide input to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and its contractors and help shape value-based care, Dr. Marc Rothman, MD, Kindred's Chief Medical Officer recently commented on efforts to develop potentially preventable readmission measures for all post-acute providers. As a provider of health care services and supports across the entire post-acute continuum, Kindred has a unique perspective about the value of each setting, actual success in reducing re-hospitalizations across all post-acute settings, and certain pitfalls to avoid in quality measure creation.

Within its comments, Kindred pointed out that it supports the development of measures to promote the delivery of high quality care to patients, and appreciates the opportunity to comment on measures that are a proxy for quality in health care delivery.  This is consistent with Kindred's endorsement of the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation (IMPACT) Act of 2014 , which set the foundation for the establishment of cross-setting quality measures and served as an important foundation to pursuing step-wise reforms necessary for value-based post-acute care reforms.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and Congress have begun to develop and test different approaches to better manage care for chronically ill beneficiaries. This has included the promotion of Chronic Care Management (CCM) to better control costs while improving the quality of care and outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries suffering from multiple chronic conditions. More specifically, CMS has supported the testing of innovative approaches including the use of home-based primary care teams to improve beneficiary health for this difficult to manage patient population while controlling costs.

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.

On April 1, 2014, the Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014 was signed into law by President Obama. Most commonly, this legislation is known for providing a one-year patch to the physician Medicare sustainable growth rate – otherwise known as the ‘doc fix’ – but it also includes other important provisions including the extension of the Part B Therapy Cap exceptions process and the establishment of a value-based purchasing (VBP) program for skilled nursing facilities.

In more common terms, the legislation creates hospital readmission reduction program for all patients cared for in nursing centers nationwide. In order to incentivize improvement in preventable admissions to short term hospitals, the legislation establishes an incentive pool for high performers.

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.

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February 9 -15, 2014 is National Cardiac Rehabilitation Week.

It may be time to leave the hospital, but you may not be ready to return directly home after recovering from a heart attack. If you need extra care, your physician may send you to a Kindred Nursing and Rehabilitation Center for our Cardiac Specialty Program. Our services help you transition from hospital to home as quickly and safely as possible, and reduce the likelihood that you’ll need to go back to the hospital.

The following questions are commonly asked by patients, family members and caregivers after a planned hospital stay. IntegraCare, an affiliate of Kindred at Home, helped to answer these questions and offer further explanation.

Q: There are usually many key players taking care of the patient, but is there someone that the patient and or family can go to for resources prior to and after discharge from a facility?

A: Case managers are assigned to a patient upon admission and follow the patient until the patient transitions to the next setting. Case managers meet one-on-one with the family and assess the needs of the patient during hospitalization and post hospitalization. They are also available to answer any questions and follow up with concerns from both the patient and family.

Q: You hear a great deal about discharge planning. What exactly is discharge planning?

As the nation’s leading provider of post-acute care services, Kindred is well-positioned to make important contributions to cutting-edge initiatives aimed at improving delivery of post-acute care across the continuum, from the long-term acute care hospital through the skilled nursing facility, rehabilitation hospital, home health and hospice.

In two Indiana skilled nursing facilities, Kindred is participating in a Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services-sponsored initiative called OPTIMISTIC – Optimizing Patient Transfers, Impacting Medical Quality and Improving Symptoms: Transforming Institutional Care. The project aims to improve health care, reduce avoidable hospitalizations and increase access to palliative care.

“OPTIMISTIC benefits our long-term residents,” said Pamela Zanes, RN, BSN, Ed.M., senior director of care transitions for Kindred Healthcare.