From USA TODAY:
A combination of giving patients more information about their conditions and better managing their medications can slow the revolving door of Medicare patients in and out of hospitals by about 20%, a study released Monday by Harvard University shows.
Researchers determined that physicians often did not have a complete list of medications that other doctors had prescribed for a patient, so they prescribed drugs that reacted badly with the patient’s other medications, said Randi Berkowitz, a geriatrics instructor at Hebrew Rehabilitation Center. Most often, Berkowitz said, patients did not understand the care they were receiving or needed.
“They think they’re sicker than they are, or they don’t understand how sick they are,” Berkowitz said.
This information can help hospitals better cope with part of the health care law that will force them to repay Medicare for the cost of patients who are readmitted to a hospital within 30 days of their previous stay, researchers said. Previous research showed that one in five Medicare patients returns to the hospital within 30 days of a previous admission…
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EDITOR: Here we see part of the core concept of Obamacare: Instead of benefiting from the real or imagined illness of their patients, hospitals are provided a financial incentive to keep them healthier and better informed. If not “Medicare for everyone”, then we need to pursue having insurance companies own hospitals in the manner of Geisinger Health Service in Pennsylvania and Kaiser Permenente in California.
Question: If you are over say 75, when is the last time that your doctor or hospital reached out to you to ask if you have any questions or to make sure you were taking proper medication and as prescribed? As a Lancaster physician observed to the Watchdog over the weekend, that was the role the family doctor used to play but now goes unattended.
