Hospital to Home Falls Short
Author
Thomas Wiest
CEO, Aspirience Home Care
Imagine this; your elderly mom was in and out of the hospital three times last summer. First with a serious liver ailment, then to treat an infection related to the liver problem and then finally to have her ‘angry’ gall bladder removed.
But as agonizing as those medical complications were, her doctors then decided it was time to leave the hospital. Mom hadn’t felt ready to go home, especially without the information and support she needed to properly heal.
This is a common scenario and one that too often leads to extended nursing home care, re-admittance to the hospital or even premature death in some cases. It just doesn’t seem right.
Hospitalization can be a turning point for older people and their caregivers, and all too often, they are the recipients of fragmented care. Problems moving patients from the hospital back home or into skilled nursing facilities have received increasing attention from senior and health care advocates in the past couple of years.
Strained budgets, weak state statutes, overwhelmed hospital discharge planners and Medicare’s failure to pay for better coordination of post hospital care have stifled efforts to fully address the problems.
That’s because people 65 and older are the fastest growing portion of the U.S. population. By 2050, the number of seniors is expected to more than double to 87 million.
It’s apparent that transitional care is rarely coordinated, leaving patients to fend for themselves as they move from hospital to nursing home or back home. Although state law requires hospitals to give patients telephone numbers of local senior agencies, they are not required to assess a patient’s home to see if it’s safe or to line up in home services for care.
Time and time again, we hear that people have been told it’s time to go home and they don’t feel ready. They are still recuperating, or the care instructions are too complicated. We know dozens who wind up back in the hospital because they were sent home too soon.
Another issue is that hospital discharge planners are overwhelmed and that hospitals do not invest enough in making sure they can adequately do their jobs for their patients. In part, because hospitals can’t bill Medicare for preparing a patient for discharge, so that process often gets cut short. Instead, because of the way hospitals are reimbursed for Medicare patient care, they are financially motivated to send patients home as soon as possible, even if it means the patient is likely to return with the same diagnosis for another costly hospital stay.
One of the best steps one can take is to partner with a strong home care provider in your time of transition and need. It can mean the difference between recovering well or not.