Rural Spotlight

Reducing Hospital Readmissions: An Action Guide

Contributed by HRSA

Avoidable hospital readmissions are under close scrutiny by policymakers, providing hospitals with added impetus to reduce costs and increase quality of care. The new Health Care Leader Action Guide to Reduce Avoidable Readmissions, funded and produced by The Commonwealth Fund, the John A. Hartford Foundation, and the Health Research & Educational Trust (HRET) of the American Hospital Association, provides a quick, simple resource for hospital leaders to get started on an action plan for reducing readmissions.

The guide outlines four key steps for hospital leaders:

1. Examine your hospital's current state of readmissions.
2. Assess and prioritize your improvement opportunities.
3. Develop an action plan of strategies to implement.
4. Monitor your hospital's progress.

In addition, the guide synthesizes the underlying strategies of interventions that have been successful in reducing unplanned readmissions, and it evaluates the level of effort required to implement these strategies.

Report of Health Insurance Exchanges

PubHub has made the following report available:

Health Insurance Exchanges in Health Care Reform: Legal and Policy Issues

Examines the role of health insurance exchanges in a reformed healthcare system, reviews past experiences with exchanges, compares the House and Senate bills' approaches to the exchanges' design and function, and discusses the policy issues they raise.

Grant Opportunity

ORHP has announced the guidance release of the Small Healthcare Provider Quality Improvement Program. To search for this opportunity, please go to www.grants.gov, Find Grant Opportunities and do a Basic Search by typing in the CFDA number: 93.912 or the Announcement Number: HRSA-10-045. The deadline to submit an application is March 15th, 2010. For further information, please contact Elizabeth Rezai-zadeh.

New Ideas for Long Time Rural Health Care Concerns

By: Sarah Jane Stewart, Virginia Rural Health Association

How does a rural hospital administrator tackle the problem of uncompensated care when it’s 15% of his expenses or $15 million in free care?  What do you do in a rural county (population 52,000) where the unemployment rate is 7.9% and 14% are on food stamps?  How do you work with a struggling free clinic and a small community health center located 15 minutes down the road?   How do you arrange for specialty care when there are few specialists in the county, and most are located in the large city 40 minutes away?  

Bill Jacobsen, CEO of Carilion Franklin Memorial Hospital in Rocky Mount, VA, pondered all these questions and organized a conference to explore how to create a comprehensive, coordinated health care system for Franklin County. 

Rural Kids Participating in Dangerous Game

New research suggests kids in rural settings are more likely to play a dangerous choking game that has become popular in recent years.  Around 8,000 eighth graders in Oregon were surveyed for the study.  More than a quarter of them admitted to participating in the act of choking in order to get a feeling of euphoria. 

Read more about the research here. 

NRHA Announces New Corporate Partnership

The National Rural Health Association has released the following statement about CTL Consulting, LLC:

In our continued efforts to bring value to the NRHA membership, CTL Consulting, LLC has become a new Corporate Partner to provide your organization both permanent recruitment and interim leadership solutions.  CTL Consulting, LLC can assist you in addressing leadership and professional-level vacancies.  Based in the Midwest, but working nationally, CTL Consulting, LLC has an exhaustive history of working with rural and critical access hospitals.  Our previous successes with NRHA members displays that we understand the needs of the membership.

CTL Consulting, LLC brings to the NRHA membership the longest guarantee of any search firm in the industry for our permanent placements.  Our search guarantee coupled with our discounted fee schedule and interim services division make CTL Consulting, LLC the perfect choice for the NRHA partnership.  Pleases let us know if we can help you fill Administrator, Director-level, Managers, as well as Nurse Practitioner/Physician Assistants.

Learn more here.

Improving Communication when Language Barriers Exist

Improving provider communication is critical to delivering effective care for individuals with limited language proficiency and those who are deaf and hard of hearing. The Joint Commission in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Civil Rights recently released a video demonstrating the importance of providing culturally competent health care to meet the needs of diverse populations.

The US Census Bureau notes that 47 million people speak a language other than English and more than 28 million people have some form of hearing loss, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. Health care organizations and providers face challenges in the use of interpreters, translated materials and in caring for an increasingly aging population with possible hearing loss needs.

The video identifies effective and alternative communication strategies and highlights the importance of relevant civil rights legislation, federal and accreditation standards pertaining to language access, in addition to the rights of patients.

Central to the concept of cultural competency is, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that recognizes equality of health care and services and mandates that all persons regardless of race, color or national origin will not be discriminated against. Failure to provide language access services to Limited English Proficient persons (LEP) for federally funded programs is a form of discrimination. Likewise, similar standards apply under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which protects the rights of individuals with disabilities.

View the video by clicking here.

Health Information Technology in California's Rural Practices: Assessing the Benefits and Barriers

The California HealthCare Foundation has released a report on technology's impact in rural California. A summary of the report follows:

Examines the benefits of and barriers to implementing health information technology such as electronic health records in rural areas, including variations in population, healthcare composition, and communications infrastructure. Includes case studies.

Find the full report here.

Making a Connection: Clinics Collaborate on EHR Deployment

The California HealthCare Foundation has released a report on clinical collaboration.  A summary of the program follows:

Outlines the work of eight grantees of the California Networks for Electronic Health Record (EHR) Adoption using four models to help community clinics and health centers collaborate to implement EHR systems. Summarizes the services EHR networks offer.

Read the report here.

Care Management of Patients with Complex Health Care Needs

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has researched the topic of care management of patients with complex health care needs. A summary of the report follows:

Explores how patients' complexity of healthcare needs, vulnerability, and age affect the cost and quality of their health care. Examines the potential for care management to improve quality of care and reduce costs, elements of success, and challenges.

Read the report here.