Healthcare

During the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare systems rapidly responded to challenges in healthcare delivery with innovation. Innovations developed during the COVID-19 pandemic have filled needed gaps in medical care and many may be sustained long term. The unique conditions and processes that facilitated such rapid, successful, and collective innovation should be explored to support future change in healthcare. Decentralized decision making, crowdsourcing, and nontraditional information sharing may be valuable for ongoing innovation in healthcare delivery...

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Medication errors during transitions of care are common, dangerous and costly. Medication reconciliation can help mitigate this risk, but it is a complex and time-consuming process when performed properly. Increasingly, pharmacy staff have been engaged to help improve medication reconciliation. However, many organizations lack the resources and staff required to perform accurate medication histories and other reconciliation tasks on all patients. We describe how three academic medical centers implemented risk scoring systems to allocate limited pharmacy resources to patients with the highest likelihood of medication reconciliation related errors...

BACKGROUND: Veteran Directed Care (VDC) aims to keep Veterans at risk for nursing home placement in their communities. VA medical centers (VAMCs) purchase VDC from third-party organizational providers who then partner with them during implementation. Experiences with VDC implementation have varied. OBJECTIVES: We sought to identify conditions differentiating partnerships with higher enrollment (implementation success). METHODS: We conducted a case-based study with: qualitative data on implementation determinants two and eight months after program start, directed content analysis to assign numerical scores (-2 strong barrier to +2 strong facilitator), and mathematical modeling using Coincidence Analysis (CNA) to identify key determinants of implementation success...

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BACKGROUND: Previous interventions to reduce emergency department (ED) overutilization from non-urgent visits have shown little success. At our hospital, we created an ED to primary care clinic (PCC) transfer protocol for non-urgent ED visits of established patients. Our study analyzed the impact of this protocol on patient encounters. METHODS: Chart reviews were conducted for a retrospective cohort of transfers from the ED to PCC from 9/01/17-8/31/18. Primary outcomes included length of stay (LOS), cost, and need for return to the ED...

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Engaging residents with nurses in interprofessional performance improvement teams can improve learning and care. Residents at the University of Chicago Medicine were identified by nurses, and endorsed by program directors, to serve alongside nurses in Improving GME Nursing Interprofessional Team Experiences (IGNITE) teams. Teams met monthly with improvement coaches to implement institutionally aligned improvement plans. Institutional data was used to monitor progress. The Interprofessional Collaborative Competencies Attainment Survey (ICCAS) assessed interprofessional collaboration competency...

Two-thirds of health professionals facing the clinical demands of responding to the Covid-19 pandemic experience psychiatric symptoms, including post-traumatic stress, anxiety, substance use, depression, insomnia, and suicide.1 , 2 Compounding matters, access to mental health services is poor, quality is variable, and stigma is prevalent. COBALT, a digital mental health and wellness platform developed at Penn Medicine, was designed to support health care workers, offering a combination of self-directed resources, virtual group sessions, and individual appointments with a stepped care model of providers, including peers, resilience coaches, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists...

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Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a major public health emergency in the United States. In 2020, 2.7 million individuals had an OUD. Medication for opioid use disorder is the evidence-based, standard of care for treating OUD in outpatient settings, especially buprenorphine because it is effective and has low toxicity. Buprenorphine is increasingly prescribed in primary care, a setting that provides greater anonymity and convenience than substance use disorder treatment centers. Yet two-thirds of people who begin buprenorphine treatment discontinue within the first six months...

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BACKGROUND: Judicious opioid prescribing and patient counseling, including in the postoperative context, are important efforts to address the U.S. opioid crisis. In discussions with patients and loved ones, there is commonly an emphasis on addiction risk. From a behavioral science standpoint, presenting addiction risk information represents a fear appeal. Clinicians may also seek to build trust and confidence by presenting balanced views of benefits and risks. However, little is known about if and how addiction risk information evokes negative emotions, affects perceptions of quality, and influences perspectives on judicious opioid prescribing...

This analysis of a 2020 nationally representative sample of 1003 U.S. Black and Hispanic/Latino households shows that experiencing racism in healthcare is associated with significantly worse quality of healthcare and lower trust in doctors reported by patients. These findings emphasize that improving healthcare for Black and Hispanic/Latino patients will require major efforts to eliminate racism on the part of health professionals and healthcare institutions.

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

BACKGROUND: Intensive primary care programs have had variable impacts on clinical outcomes, possibly due to a lack of consensus on appropriate patient-selection. The US Veterans Health Administration (VHA) piloted an intensive primary care program, known as Patient Aligned Care Team Intensive Management (PIM), in five medical centers. We sought to describe the PIM patient selection process used by PIM teams and to explore perspectives of PIM team members regarding how patient selection processes functioned in context...

BACKGROUND: Responding to the shift toward value-based care, hospitals engaged in widespread experimentation of implementing transitional care (TC) strategies to improve patient experience and reduce unnecessary readmissions. However, which groups of these strategies are most strongly associated with better outcomes remains unknown. METHODS: Using a retrospective longitudinal design, we collected hospitals' TC strategy implementation data for 370 U S. hospitals and obtained claims data for 2...

BACKGROUND: Population risk segmentation and technology-enabled preventive care workflows are core competencies for Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) that may also have relevance for public health emergencies. METHODS: During the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, we aimed to leverage existing ACO capabilities to support 467 primary care practices across 27 states with pandemic response. We used Medicare claims and electronic health records to identify patients with increased COVID-19 vulnerability, for proactive outreach and guidance for "Staying Well at Home...

In this article, we describe how innovation contests-a vehicle to crowdsource ideas and problem-solving efforts-propelled frontline employees to exert discretionary efforts in organizational problem-solving at Massachusetts General Hospital. As designers and administrators of four innovation contests in three disease centers, we share firsthand knowledge of how the contests enabled clinicians and administrative staff, whose primary job is delivering high-quality patient care, to become involved in ideation, selection, and implementation of their own ideas...