Please respond to the following discussion post with 1 reference cited in teh laxt five years:
The Emergency Department has always served as the main entry into the hospital to get the quality care that every patient needs. This is where everything begins. However, being one of the busiest, if not the most dynamic, area in the hospital, it needs someone to coordinate care and facilitate the process flow and, most importantly, the needs of the patients. The case manager enables proper hospital admissions, coordinates care, ensures that every treatment and test is performed promptly, and facilitates a safe discharge. They also work closely with the multidisciplinary team, identifying social factors and barriers to care and discharges, and providing solutions.
In our hospital, the problem identified is the lack of a case management and care coordination program in the Emergency Department. Due to short staffing, the Emergency Department has been left with no case management coverage for more than a year now. We have determined that there is room for improvement in our organization in terms of ED wait times, patients placed in inappropriate levels of care, inappropriate inpatient admissions such as social admissions, and increased insurance denials, with a case management and care coordination program. These identified factors can impact the quality of the patient care provided not only in the ED but also in the entire hospital. Considering that approximately 70 percent of hospital admissions enter through the ED, addressing the needs of these patients and lowering the cost of care in this area can have a significant impact across an organization (Sallee et al., 2018).
A qualitative research by Galarraga (2021), “Emergency department care coordination strategies and perceived impact under Maryland’s hospital payment reforms,” has shown that participants perceived ED care coordination as effective in facilitating safer discharges and addressing social determinants of health. This writer aims to investigate if, for ED patients (P), does implementing a case management and care coordination program in the Emergency Department (I) when compared to not having a case management and care coordination program (C) lead to improved quality patient care, reduced ED wait times, lesser inappropriate level of care admission, reduced insurance denials (O) over the course of 6 months (T).
References:
Sallee, L., Rhodes, H., & Trespasz, C. (2018). Emergency Department Case Management – Huron. Huron Consulting Group. https://www.huronconsultinggroup.com/insights/emergency-department-case-management
Galarraga, J. E., DeLia, D., Wilhite, D., Romero-Barrientos, R., O’Sullivan, K., Noccolino, D., Pimentel, L., Woodcock, C., Fairbanks, R. J., & Pines, J. M. (2021). Emergency department care coordination strategies and perceived impact under Maryland’s hospital payment reforms. The American Journal of Emergency Medicine, 45, 578589. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajem.2020.12.048
