30-day readmission prevention program in heart failure patients (RAP-HF) in a community hospital: creating a task force to improve performance in achieving CMS target goals. Issue 5 (2nd September 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Macchio, Phyllis; Farrell, Lorraine; Kumar, Vikas; Illyas, Wajiah; Barnes, Martin; Patel, Himani; Silverman, Andrew L.; Hong Le, Thuy; Siddique, Haseeb; Raminfard, Albert; Tofano, Michael; Sokol, Jacob; Haggerty, Greg; Kaell, Alan; Rabbani, Shuaib; Faro, Joan
• Is Part Of: Journal of community hospital internal medicine perspectives. Volume 10:Issue 5(2020)
• Page Start: 413
• Page End: 418
• Publication Date: 2020-09-02
• Subjects: Heart failure -- quality improvement -- community hospital -- readmissions; Internal medicine -- Periodicals; Hospitals -- Periodicals; Hospitals, Community; Internal Medicine; Hospitals; Internal medicine; Periodicals; Periodicals; 610
• DOI: 10.1080/20009666.2020.1800910
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2000-9666

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In 2012, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced it would penalize any hospitals that had 30-day readmission rates for heart failure (HF) patients above 20%. Mather Hospital Northwell Health, a community teaching hospital, organized a proactive task force to meet these goals. We describe our hospital-wide Readmission Prevention in Heart Failure (RAP-HF) project. We focused on the following interventions: early identification of patients at risk for readmission, discipline-specific mitigation planning by the interdisciplinary rounding team, enhanced medication education for heart failure patients, education of family/caregivers on medication and heart failure symptoms, facilitation in scheduling of post-discharge follow up visits and hard-wired communication between hospital and post-discharge care providers. We saw a 25.53% decrease in 30-day readmission rates.