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Dr. Robbin Dick

Integrated Acute Care: The Impact of a Patient Centered Admission Team

When patient care is a priority, there is a natural integration of more and more elements of the patient’s hospital experience, from their entry process through their stay and finally their discharge. Not only is integrating care delivery service more efficient at delivering care – it’s more effective. An integrated care delivery model starts with […]

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Observation Medicine: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Observation medicine in 2017 has proved no less a hot topic than it has been recent years. Institutions continue to develop observation units and processes to determine the correct level of care for when a patient requires hospitalization. This has not been a smooth transition from the days when a patient requiring admission as an inpatient […]

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Wall Street Journal Should Dig Deeper on Observation Care

The Wall Street Journal’s Dec. 1 story on observation care is relatively even-handed and does a good job at bringing to light the highly complex web of regulation, which has gotten a little slice of the U.S. health care system to where it is today. The gist of the story is rather straightforward: 30-day readmissions […]

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Four Rules for Bed Assignment In An Efficient Hospital

Editor’s Note: the following is an excerpt from Dr. Robbin Dick’s forthcoming book on Hospital Capacity Management. Dr. Dick is MEP’s Director of Observation Services. He will be speaking on hospital capacity management and other subjects at MEP’s third annual observation medicine conference, Observation Care ’15. Bed assignment often sets the pulse for the entire hospital, affecting every patient and every […]

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How Do We Measure Real Value in the Emergency Department?

Emergency Department Directors measure value in their departments with a number of metrics that are tracked religiously: door-to-provider times, ambulance drop-off times, left without being seen rates, length of stay for discharged patients, diversion hours, and 72-hour returns all come to mind. These  metrics clearly measure the performance of the Emergency Department, what to they […]

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Hospital Capacity Management II: The Surge

Surge is used when a hospital has reached the point of over-capacity, requiring the hospital to implement a unique processes to allow for decompression. If surging becomes a frequent occurrence in any hospital organization, a sort of “surge fatigue” will occur, when activation means little if anything to associated staff.

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Hospital Capacity Management: Handling Complex Care Patients

Among the range of groups whose care sucks up a disproportionate amount of healthcare resources, “Complex Care Patients” present a special challenge for hospital leaders seeking to improve their hospital’s capacity management. These patients require special processes and a deliberate strategy to ensure that their hospital stay isn’t prolonged further than necessary. Failure to address […]

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Hospital Capacity Management and the Enlightened Hospital Leader

Nearly every hospital leader in America will tell you their hospital is all about patient-centered care. Of course, we know this isn’t true in many cases, especially when it comes to hospital capacity management. Though many institutions will deny to its last dying breath that they have any priorities that supercede patient care, nearly all […]

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What is observation care? Clearing up common misperceptions

To treat observation care as simply a loophole that allows hospitals to avoid the Medicare penalties from readmissions — as Brad Wright, an assistant professor of health management and policy at the University of Iowa did earlier this month on KevinMD.com — is to take a short-sighted approach to a complex health issue. Observation care in […]

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