Healthcare Reform Changes - A Basic Graphical Timeline.

On 3/23/2010 president Obama signed the healthcare reform bill into law. While there are still differences that need to be reconciled between the various versions of the healthcare bill here is the timeline for healthcare reform changes and how Obama's health plan (ObamaCare) and healthcare reform affects you and your health insurance:

10 Patient Communications Tips For Hospital and Clinic

Hospital systems and hospital-owned clinics have an opportunity to connect with patients, potential patients and those who influence them like never before. Below is a list of 10 ways to do it, and please note none of these include spending more on traditional advertising.

1. Create and locally promote your physician locator.

2. Make sure your physician locator includes maps, directions, parking instructions/validation information, and links out to area services for patients’ family members, such as pharmacies, restaurants, shopping.

3. Create and locally promote a searchable patient ambassador network tied to physicians, clinic locations and conditions, so your patients can read about others “like them.”

4. Encourage patients and their “care guiders” to provide satisfaction or “How Are We Doing?” information at every stop along your system’s health care path.

5. Leverage technology to communicate with patients where they are — mobile, online, your waiting room, Facebook, email.

6. Any time your clinic is going to make a referral to a specialist, provide printed materials that cover information on that specialist from the physician locator.

7. Create two-way communications opportunities for patients to build a community of care with them.

8. Ensure every patient-facing messaging effort accomplishes the following objectives:

• Sets appropriate expectations
• Guides through your system’s healthcare maze
• Educates patients and care guiders
• Improves satisfaction, from general practitioner to hospital to recovery to rehab

9. Always provide quality, custom and easy-to-understand patient education materials on conditions and treatments options.

10. Finally: Always, always, always connect with patients! Use images, words and methods your patients will understand.

Source - healthcarecommunication

Ebola Risk Management Tips For Healthcare & Hospitals

Ebola is a critical virus that is affecting people thousands of miles away in West Africa and its arrived in the United States. Ebola is a severe, often fatal illness in humans, which is transmitted to people from wild animals. There are currently no licensed Ebola vaccines but, it does not mean Ebola patients can't be saved.

If you take care of your healthcare and hospitals than you can stop to spread this dangerous Virus. Here are some considerable tips for Hospitals and Healthcare Facility that should keep in mind when considering its internal risk management strategy in relation to Ebola and infectious disease in general.

1. Set up Policies, Demonstrate Compliance

Establish an organized, multidisciplinary framework that demonstrates compliance with best practices and available guidance by putting in place policies and procedures specific to infection control and particularly for those who contemplate caring for patients with potentially highly infectious conditions.

You should keep in mind various essential factors while considering policies like-

• Care protocols for Ebola suspected,
• Environment care,
• Treatment of infectious waste,
• Transportation of patients,
• Use of isolation rooms and systems,
• Staff follow-up and monitoring post-exposure

2. Educate Staff, Demonstrate Due Diligence

Staff should be trained to -

• Identify the signs and symptoms
• Correlating factors in diagnosing Ebola
• Reduce risk of transmission
• Provide necessary clinical care

3. Maintain Vigilance

Maintain vigilance with the policies and procedures above to ensure staff compliance. Audit behavior to ensure that best practices that take into account CDC guidance, as well as real-time experience from those in the field, are diligently followed, where applicable. Intervene immediately where any lapse in policy, procedure or process is identified, and share lessons learned.

4. Cut down Error Risk

Keep attention high and staff focused to reduce risk of errors. Ensure that the framework developed and educational efforts are collaborative among medical staff, nursing staff, and other clinical and non-clinical team members.

5. Know Your Capacity

Avoid getting in over your head—identify what your facility can and cannot handle. Consider a SWOT analysis by evaluating Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of both physical and human resources. Consider also undertaking a process of confirmation and documentation of facility capabilities to help guide patient care and potential transport if a suspected case is identified in your facility or another facility nearby.

6. Address Staff Concerns

Consider employee matters. Be prepared to deal with concerns of staff. Support of and care for staff does not stop at the end of a shift or with the recovery or demise of a patient with an infectious disease like Ebola.

The original article published - mwe

Causes & Management of Stress for Healthcare Workers

Employers should provide a stress-free work environment, recognize where stress is becoming a problem for staff, and take action to reduce stress. Stress in the workplace reduces productivity, increases management pressures, and makes people ill in many ways, evidence of which is still increasing.

Stress and stress management are directly related to personal well-being and specifically to workplace well-being.

Causes of stress at work

1. Lack of effective communication and conflict resolution
2. Office politics and conflict among staff
3. Bullying or harassment, by anyone, not necessarily a person's manager
4. Excessive time away from home and family
5. Lack of job security
6. Feeling powerless and uninvolved in determining one's own responsibilities
7. Long working hours
8. Continuous unreasonable performance demands
9. A feeling that one's reward reward is not commensurate with one's responsibility
10. Working hours, responsibilities and pressures disrupting life-balance (diet, exercise, sleep and rest, play, family-time, etc)

Stress Management Ideas-

Here are some tips you can apply to reduce stress-

1. Brisk Walk and Self-Talk

Go for a short quick really brisk walk outside.Change your environment & breathe in some fresh air and smell the atmosphere. Trees, rain, flowers, traffic fumes - doesn't matter - stimulate your senses with new things.

2. Make a Cuppa

Any tea will do, but a flavored cup of tea is even better.Experiment with different natural flavorings using herbs and spices and fruit.

3. Humour

Humour is one of the greatest and quickest devices for reducing stress. Humour works because laughter produces helpful chemicals in the brain. Keep taking the laughter medicine until you feel suitably relaxed and re-charged.

4. Rehydrate

Go get a big cup or a bottle of water. Most of us fail to drink enough water - that's water - not tea, coffee, coke, 'sports' drinks, Red Bull or fruit juice. If you starve your body of water you will function below your best - and you will get stressed. Physically and mentally. You will drink more water if you keep some on your desk at all times - it's human nature to drink it if it's there - so go get some now.

5. Catnap or Powernap

Take a quick nap. It is nature's way of recharging and re-energising. A quick 10-30 minutes' sleep is very helpful to reduce stress.

Source - businessballs

Effective Tips For Better Revenue Cycle Management

To keep bottom lines healthy, organizations are turning to a process called lean revenue cycle management.

Here, Gallagher provides six tips on lean revenue cycle management.

1. Focused on the mission

In order to maximize the benefits of lean management, everyone involved in the improvement process must be aligned

2. Keep an eye on Changes

It is more important now than ever to keep up to date with latest legislative decisions,” Gallagher said.

3. Understand payer contracts

Gallagher says it’s crucial for those involved in the revenue cycle to fully understand payer contracts.  

4. Scope value stream

In lean management, a value stream defines all the activities — both value-added and non-value added — required within an organization to deliver a specific service

5. Information technology is not everything

Going out and purchasing what Gallagher calls a “magic” software package is not going solve the problem, revenue cycle management or otherwise.

6. Internal transparency

Gallagher said, “it is important to be transparent internally and to not point fingers or play the blame game, but rather to focus on what you can do to fix the process.”

Source: medicalpracticeinsider

How to Improve Patient Satisfaction - Best Hospital Marketing Techniques

Remember when you first consulted Expedia or TripAdvisor to read reviews on hotels? It probably drastically changed the way you shopped for a place to stay. Now hospitals are facing the same world of transparency and competition, and they would do well to consult the marketing playbook hotels and other service businesses use to enhance their customers’ experience.

How can hospitals be sure they are providing a good patient experience? Through the  RATER model for customer satisfaction, a marketing framework used in all kinds of service contexts, from hospitality to customer support in technology firms.

RATER stands for Reliability, Assurance, Tangibles, Empathy, and Responsiveness. Here’s how these metrics fit in to the health care context:

Reliability : Like any other service, health care is supremely human-oriented. That’s a good thing—I can’t imagine a robot giving me a physical examination—but humans are, well, human.  They are moody, inconsistent and can get tired. But patients want their health care provider to be reliable.

Assurance : In health care, probably more than any other area, people want to feel confident that they’re getting the right service. Doctors can give assurance by talking openly with their patients.

Tangibles : Patients would benefit from something tangible after their treatment, like instructions for home care, tips to stay healthy, or glow-caps on prescription bottles to remind you to take your medicine.

Empathy : When doctors have empathy, it helps them communicate recommendations in a way that’s sensitive to the patient’s values and aspirations.

Responsiveness : How long should you wait to see a doctor? When can you expect the results of your mammogram? These are questions of responsiveness, and they are based in large part on patient expectations.

I recommend using the RATER scale to see where businesses stand with customers on each of the five dimensions. Then share the findings with service providers and brainstorm ways to improve the score.

Original Article - Forbes

4 Healthcare Tips That Can Save Your Life

Thousands of people contact our organization with medical questions, and most of them--no matter how smart they are--contact us because they don't know how to get the medical information they need to stay well or to recover from illness. Going online can be very helpful, very confusing, or even dangerous.

Here are some simple tips to help:

1. Don't wait.

2. Be thoughtful about treatment decisions.

3. Research doctors and medical facilities.

4. Stick to reputable websites.

Read Full Article - huffington post

Obamacare Or Not, Republicans Should Focus On Reducing The Cost Of Health Care

For all the endless talk about reforming the health care system these past five years, it’s remarkable how little we've done to solve its actual problems. Spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize insurance coverage for several million people? That’s the easy part. The hard part is addressing the fact that American health care is so expensive.

The high price of U.S. health care is the fundamental reason tens of millions of Americans are uninsured. It’s the principal suppressor of middle-class wage growth. It’s a constant threat to businesses’ operating margins, and it’s the primary driver of the federal debt.

Continue Reading.....

Reform Update: Flood of New Patients Worries Mental Health Workers

Many behavioral healthcare advocates and providers across the country are reporting significantly increased demand for their services because of the Medicaid expansion in some states. But they are worried about whether underfunded and understaffed mental health centers will be able to adequately serve the flood of new clients.

Officials at Arapahoe/Douglas Mental Health Network and AspenPointe in Colorado say they have noticed an uptick in the number of Medicaid patients they're seeing. Those organizations did not have data on exactly how many more patients they're seeing.

Mindsprings Health in Grand Junction, Colo., saw an increase from about 250 people a month to 350 a month since January, and most of that increase was Medicaid patients, Michelle Hoy, the organization's regional director, told Health News Colorado. Similarly, the Mental Health Center of Denver reported that calls increased from 2,030 in January to 2,156 in March, compared with 1,500 in March of last year.

Read More on Modern Healthcare