Delayed Care Linked to Increase in NJ Excess Deaths During Pandemic, Report Says

Health systems, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations have reported significant decreases in service utilization in the early months of the pandemic linked to patient concern over becoming infected with COVID-19 in a healthcare setting. In a September 2020 New Jersey Hospital Association survey of a representative sampling of Garden State adults, 83% of survey respondents reported being concerned about going to a hospital due to fear of contracting COVID-19.

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As Patients Fell Ill With COVID-19 Inside Hospitals, Government Oversight Fell Short

Hospitals, like Riverside, with high rates of COVID patients who didn’t have the diagnosis when they were admitted have rarely been held accountable due to multiple gaps in government oversight, a KHN investigation has found. While a federal reporting system closely tracks hospital-acquired infections for MRSA and other bugs, it doesn’t publicly report covid caught in individual hospitals.

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Renown Health Begins RPM Journey With Inpatient Program

Many healthcare organizations pivoted to telehealth during the pandemic to shift in-person services onto virtual platforms, and RPM programs soon followed that trajectory. The idea behind RPM is that a health system can track and care for patients in their home by capturing key data, such as vital signs, through either connected devices or by having the patient collect that data.

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2020 Report to Congress: CMS Remains Critical of AO Performance

In a report to Congress released late Wednesday, CMS said it will continue putting pressure on AOs to do a better job of enforcing Medicare’s Conditions of Participation but is also fine-tuning the process of how it validates their performance. Concerns remained concentrated on AOs failures to find problems within the physical environment that were spotted by CMS’s state survey agencies during surveys to validate the AOs findings. Validation surveys are supposed to be conducted within 60 days of an AO’s triennial visit.

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Expert: Healthcare Worker Burnout Trending in Alarming Direction

Bernadette Melnyk, PhD, RN, APRN-CNP, is chief wellness officer of The Ohio State University and dean of the university’s College of Nursing. She is a nationally recognized leader on healthcare worker burnout and well-being. Melnyk has published dozens of research articles on healthcare worker burnout and well-being in peer-reviewed journals.

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How to Implement a Clinical Debriefing Program at Health Systems and Hospitals

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality provides a definition of clinical debriefing: “A dialogue between two or more people whose goals are to discuss the actions and thought processes involved in a particular patient care situation to encourage reflection on those actions and thought processes and incorporate improvement into future performance.”

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