MCH Home Health Agency Named "Best Practice Agency"
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4/17/2006
Madera Community Hospital’s Home Health Agency "in recognition of your outstanding performance in the acute care hospitalization outcome" was awarded a Best Practice Agency certificate on November 29, 2005.
Briggs Corporation in conjunction with Fazzi Associates and the National Association for Homecare (NAHC) conducted a study in 2005 of over 320 agencies from every region of the country.
The goal of the study was to identify the most successful agencies in the country and identify which strategies and practices they used to achieve such low hospitalization rates. Agencies were asked to identify what they do that enables them to reduce re-hospitalizations of their patients.
HHS Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reports preventable hospitalizations are a significant issue with regard to both quality and cost. During the year 2000, nearly 5 million admissions were made to UDS hospitals with conditions that "may have been preventable if individuals had received high quality primary and preventative care." The cost was more than $26.5 billion dollars. AHRQ went on to say that given "an average cost of $5,300/ admission, even a 5% decrease in the rate of potentially avoidable hospitalizations could result in a cost savings for more than #1.3 billion." It is no wonder that the issue of unplanned hospitalization has jumped to the forefront in these new quality initiatives.
For home care, the primary means of measuring and reporting on quality are the OBQI measures. One of the most important OBQI measures, if not the most important, is the measure of hospitalization. For home care, the national average for acute care hospitalization is 28%. MCH HHA’s average is 13%, which is 15% below the national average!
MCH HHA cites overall supervision of each patient by one case manager clinician (either an RN or PT) as the most significant reason their rehospitalization rate is so low. In addition, use of a clinical specialist in wound care, and certain clinical pathways that enable complete care of each patient are used in order to give each patient and family as many tools as possible to keep our patients in the community without being readmitted to the hospital.
MCH is proud to offer the services of its home health agency to the community and plans to do so for years to come.
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