Alarm Raised Over Patient Boarding in Emergency Departments

Boarding in emergency departments occurs when there is a shortage of inpatient beds for hospital admissions or there are no beds at external facilities such as psychiatric hospitals. The Joint Commission recommends that emergency department boarding not exceed four hours; however, it has become common to have emergency department boarding for days or weeks, according to ACEP.

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Share Your Innovative Quality Improvement Ideas

Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare is seeking to spotlight the best healthcare quality improvement case studies. By imparting their in-the-trenches experiences and lessons learned, the chosen case studies will shed light on an issue, practice, or principle that affects stakeholders across the modern medical staff landscape.

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Mass General Brigham Issues Patient Code of Conduct

Under a newly imposed Patient Code of Conduct, patients and visitors who disrupt care, make verbal or physical threats — including racist, sexist, discriminatory or disrespectful comments about clinicians, other hospital staff, other patients and visitors — could face a verbal reprimand, and even expulsion from the Boston hospital and possible suspension of future care access.

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Monitoring TAVR Patients for Improved Outcomes

For patients with severe symptomatic aortic stenosis, a transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) procedure is often performed as a minimally invasive alternative to open-heart surgery. This helps shorten a patient’s hospital stay and increases their chances of being discharged home. As TAVR procedures become more common, hospitals are now leveraging cardiac monitoring devices to monitor for significant arrhythmias post-discharge.

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To Reduce Risk in Value-Based Care, Focus on Care Quality

The key tenet of value-based care is that provider reimbursement is directly connected to care quality. Value-based arrangements stand in sharp contrast to how providers are compensated under fee-for-service models, which reward more revenues for more tests and procedures.

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