Health care has gone through many paradigm shifts in the past few years with focus on quality and containing the skyrocketing costs. As many more citizens find access to health care and insurance (7.1 million signed up under the Affordable Care Act) and the Baby Boom generation moves into the later stages of life, many more challenges will be felt by the industry.
The focus has changed from a sick care delivery system to a wellness system. Patients are charged with the responsibility for their own health status and to do this they need education. That education has to include not only disease management and medication reconciliation, but specific instructions in how to access and maneuver through the healthcare system. Nurses have found themselves at the helm of this process and the backbone of the healthcare system. Success lies in the hands of the nurses; both in ensuring patients are able to control their health status and prevent complications, and in ensuring patient satisfaction through evidence based quality patient care. The measurable outcome means reimbursement is maximized.
Quality
is quickly becoming the standard by which healthcare providers are being
reimbursed. One of the primary measures of quality is patient satisfaction. Satisfaction is tied to the quality of care received and the outcomes achieved. Reimbursement is and will be driven by the quality of care. In 2009, Medicare began to institute Do-Not-Pay penalties for specific errors such as wrong site surgeries, vascular catheter infections, other hospital acquired infections, bed sores, falls, air embolisms, and UTIs from Foley catheters.
Many of these items very much involve nursing care and it’s now more important than ever to ensure that nurses are using
evidence based practice when providing care.
This can be a challenge when nurses come to organizations with
different ideas and approaches to patent care from their past education and experience.
Ensuring that patients get the quality nursing care they
deserve involves training nurses in the best evidence based practice standards from day one. This requires a thorough onboarding process to ensure nurses have strong clinical competencies and skills and continue to be educated on the most up to date best practices. Many find that the onboarding
process and continuing staff education can be cumbersome and difficult to track on paper, however, talent
management software like those provided by Halogen can simply this process. Providing the best quality patient care and achieving optimum patient satisfaction are key to reimbursement and need to begin from day one.
Disclosure: This content has been brought to you by Halogen Software, the market leader in talent management software. Bringing value to nurses is at the forefront of Halogen Software’s goals so they are partnering with nurse leaders online to bring attention to important issues that healthcare organizations face every day. To find out more Halogen Software and the support they can provide to your nursing staff check out their healthcare page.
