Current Trends

Read about current trends in utilization, medical practice, care delivery, and regulations and their facility impact.

New Standard for Residential Care Facilities

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The Facility Guidelines Institute (FGI) has developed a new standard titled Guidelines for Design and Construction of Residential Health, Care, and Support Facilities. This document provides minimum recommendations for new construction and renovation of nursing homes, hospice facilities, assisted living facilities, independent living settings, adult day care facilities, wellness centers, and outpatient rehabilitation centers. According to the FGI website, the new standard has been developed in response to the widespread adoption of person-centered care and deinstitutionalization in the residential care industry. Based on Part 4 (Residential Care Facilities) of the 2010 edition of the FGI Guidelines for Design and Construction of Health Care Facilities and public proposals submitted on that text in fall 2011, the book is divided into a section on planning and predesign, a section on design and construction elements common to all facility types in the book, and sections grouped by facility type. This document was first published in early in 2014 and was updated in 2018.

This article is an update of a previous post.

Shared Medical Appointments Are Becoming a New Outpatient Care Option

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Most patients wait alone in a cramped exam room for a scheduled appointment as their physician rushes through back-to-back individual patient visits lasting an average of 22 minutes each. With the growing trend of shared medical appointments, a patient and his/her peers spend a full 90 minutes with their personal physician. Shared medical appointments are a small but growing part of primary care as well as for a variety of medical specialties. According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, the percentage of its members offering shared medical appointment more than doubled, to nearly 12 percent, between 2005 and 2012. At the Cleveland Clinic, nearly 10,000 group appointments were logged between 2002 and 2014. Promoted as the wave of the future in outpatient care, group appointments are changing the way physicians and patients view medical treatment.

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Community Clinics, ACA Beneficiaries, Worry About Their Future

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Patient With DoctorCommunity clinics are key providers of primary care services for the poor. Treating people for free or for very little money has been the role of community health centers — a type of community clinic — across the U.S. for decades. In 2015, 1 in 12 Americans sought care at one of these clinics; nearly 6 in 10 were women, and hundreds of thousands were veterans. With roughly 1,400 community clinics nationwide, they have also expanded in recent years to serve people who gained insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and these clinics have been the poster child of the positive impact of the landmark ACA.

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Micro-Hospitals — A New Healthcare Model

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Thinking small allows a healthcare system to test demand or grow its presence in a specific market without the expense of a traditional greenfield full-service campus. Although not all alike, most micro-hospitals focus on treating low-acuity patients and provide ambulatory and emergency services — leaving more complex clinical services and surgeries to the larger, full-service hospitals within their broader healthcare network. They also have a lot fewer beds, often only 8 to 12.

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Redefining Patient-Centered Care

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A lot has changed since the concept of patient-centered care was first introduced several decades ago. The old definition of patient-centered care used to be bringing care of the patient to the bedside. That model ― which included decentralizing diagnostic equipment, pharmacies, and supply rooms to each inpatient floor ― proved too costly both from a facility and labor perspective. Today, the patient-centered care concept has moved to a relationship-based care model focused on orienting a health care organization around the preferences and needs of patients with the intention of improving the patient’s satisfaction with care and improving his or her clinical outcome. Today, the definition has also been expanded to include family members and is often referred to as the patient- and family-centered care (PFCC) model.

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What’s New in Radiology? Highlights of the RSNA 2015 Annual Meeting

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The Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual meeting in late November 2015 is the premier scientific and educational meeting that brings together radiologists, oncologists, physicists, radiological technologists, and allied healthcare professionals from around the world. This meeting used to be dominated by “heavy metal” with flashy introductions of new imaging modalities. Today, there is more emphasis on smaller, light-weight, mobile, and more versatile equipment, along with new software enhancements for existing equipment to provide better clinical data and workflow productivity.

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