Many hospital emergency departments (EDs) have specialty areas for children. Now some are developing separate areas for seniors with geriatric team-based care, more comfort, and less noise and confusion. The focus of the specialized team is to not just treat the immediate problem, but to uncover underlying problems ― from depression to dementia to a hazard-prone home environment. Seniors already account for more than million ED visits a year and by 2030, 20 percent of all Americans will be 65 or older. Older adults have different needs which are often at odds with modern EDs that are best equipped to handle crises like gunshot wounds or car crashes. Geriatric patients often need lengthy detective work to unravel the multiple ailments that they tend to show up with and may exhibit different symptoms than younger people. Their illnesses may cause confusion that can be mistaken for dementia. At the same time, cognitive problems may not be obvious when these patients are describing their symptoms or the onset of their medical problem. Seniors also have a high rate of recurrent visits to the ED.
Facility Components
You can search for all articles related to a specific clinical service or major facility component.
Transforming Primary Care With the Patient-Centered Medical Home Model
The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) model ― also referred to as advanced primary care and the healthcare home ― holds promise as a way to improve American healthcare by transforming how primary care is organized and delivered. This team-based model of care is led by a personal physician who ideally provides continuous and coordinated care throughout the patient’s lifetime to maximize health outcomes. The PCMH practice is responsible for all of a patient’s healthcare needs or appropriately arranging care with other qualified professionals. This includes the provision of preventative services, treatment of acute and chronic illness, and assistance with end-of-life issues.
Reverse Migration of Outpatient Services to the Hospital Campus (An Update)
Many medical services are provided both in hospital and community settings, such as physician offices and freestanding imaging or ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs). Services commonly provided in both settings include laboratory tests, physical therapy, outpatient surgery, routine and advanced imaging, physician visits, and noninvasive and invasive procedures, such as endoscopy or cardiac catheterization. When the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) originally developed the hospital outpatient department (HOPD) designation to establish a higher reimbursement rate for hospital-based outpatient services, hospitals started purchasing physician practices, freestanding imaging centers, and ambulatory surgery centers and rebranding them as hospital outpatient departments to collect the higher Medicare payments.
Hospital Laboratories Face New Organizational Models
The practice of laboratory medicine continues to experience revolutionary change as a result of consolidation, an increasing number of “waived” tests, and changing medical practices. These factors have already had a significant impact on hospital-based laboratories and will continue to affect their operations over the next decade.
Hospital Data Centers Straining to Keep Up With New Demands
The hospital data center — once an onerous operational cost center — is now a critical component in delivering quality patient care, ensuring regulatory compliance, and enabling collaboration among caregivers. Hospital networks today support everything from traditional accounting to highly advanced remote surgery and diagnostic procedures using telemedicine. As use of digital imaging increases logarithmically so does the need to store more and more information — and in a wider variety of formats — that must be accessible in real time. Historically, stakeholder groups for data center projects consisted of information technology, facilities management, and security staff. Today, active participants may include the Chief Medical Officer, Chief Information Officer, compliance managers, sustainability managers, risk management staff, and a variety of physicians and other caregivers.
Virtual NICU Being Developed in Southern California
Virtual medicine allows patients to receive specialized care even when they are in remote locations far from medical experts and care specialists. It may eliminate the need to transfer a highly fragile infant from one hospital to another and allow high-quality care to be made available to infants in rural or remote locations — particularly given the national shortage of neonatologists. Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles and the Center of Fetal and Neonatal Medicine are developing and implementing a virtual neonatal intensive care unit (vNICU) structure to initially link two hospital sites. The long-term goal is to create a network of hospital NICUs across Southern California connected via telemedicine.