
Linking Readmission, Reimbursement Exposes Complex Needs of Diabetes Patients
Linking Readmission, Reimbursement Exposes Complex Needs of Diabetes Patients
Coverage from the 2017 meeting of the American Association of Diabetes Educators.
Few elements of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have forced health systems to rethink their role in patients lives like the penalties Medicare charges if they fare poorly on 30-day readmission rates.
While the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program has sparked debate since it started in 2012, it has forced healthcare staff to reach into the community, to ask why some patients land back in the hospital and others dont. With the earliest 30-day measures measuring how many returned after heart attacks, heart failure, and pneumonia, patients with diabetes quickly captured health systems attention since they were likely candidates for readmission.
What hospitals are learning, according to a speaker at the American Association of Diabetes Educators annual meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana, is that a patients diabetes may not be first on the list of health problems. That makes successful interventions complicated, and it often means that solutions must be customized to a patients unique needs.
Virginia Peragallo-Dittko, RN, CDE, BC-ADM, FAADE, executive director of the Diabetes and Obesity Institute of NYU Winthrop Hospital and professor of Medicine at Stony Brook School of Medicine, told educators gathered Saturday that the right model for reducing readmissions doesnt have the hospital at the topit has the community at the top.
Transitions are going to look different, she said. While the ACA has forced changes and thi
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