How do you think you became sick enough to come back to the hospital? It’s a simple enough question, but one which can have dramatic effects for improving the financial outlook and quality of patient care delivered for hospitals and health system enrolled in the State Action on Avoidable Rehospitalizations (STAAR) initiative.
STAAR is a program created by the Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI) in which participating hospitals are required to conduct assessments on selected readmitted patients, and then analyze the results. The assessment tries to gather all information from patients on their experiences through the healthcare cycle narrowing down to how strictly they took their medications and how they followed up their care before readmitting themselves to the hospital.
Patient and family interviews are a crucial part to STAAR, as well as organizing and communicating with the multidisciplinary groups of outpatient and inpatient centers that collaborate with the hospitals. The point is to drill as deep as possible when a patient indicates a lapse in care. All of these efforts are used to drive the ultimate goal of the program: reduce 30 days readmissions by streamlining the discharge transition and enhancing collaboration with the health partners involved in the patient treatment process.
Implemented in 2009, STAAR is not a new program, but more results in its efficacy are coming to light. Some of the key takeaways are quite profound and are a good sign to any hospital and health system looking for innovative readmission lowering strategies.
• Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts and Tufts Medical Center in Boston have seen their greatest results in congestive heart failure patients, reducing readmissions by 30% and 50%. Now Tufts has a standardized assessment for all patients; analyzing who is most at risk for readmission and developing the plan to avoid that from occurring.
• UMass Memorial Medical Center increased communication and coordination seeing a 2% reduction in overall readmissions from 2009-2010.
• Hospitals have stepped up their game in providing simplistic post discharge instructions asking patients to demonstrate what they need to do to take care of themselves to ensure the procedure sticks.
• When collaborating with their affiliate outpatient and inpatient clinics, hospitals made sure their home-care management programs matched the hospitals so patients were hearing the same set of instructions from all sides.
Reducing avoidable readmissions is a team effort and while there have been challenges with STAAR such as properly educating patients and having providers act in an integrated delivery system, something they haven’t had to do before, the results look promising.
To see the assessment worksheet click here. Information for this post was gathered from http://staar.posterous.com
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