8 MAY 2024IN MY OPINIONIN MY OPINIONIN MY OPINIONUtilizing Care Management to Reduce Length of Stay and Improve Patient OutcomesBy Jonna Jenkins, Vice President of Patient Care Services, Chief Nursing Officer,Hutchinson Regional Healthcare SystemPatients diagnosed with chronic disease processes are some of the largest consumers of healthcare. While healthcare utilization is high, outcomes do not reflect that. Many individuals with chronic diseases are not given a clear expectation of how their disease will progress and what they and their families can expect. Clinicians understand that from initial diagnosis it would be valuable to start the conversation related to palliative care. However, people that do not work in healthcare are often afraid of the term palliative care as they associate it with not treating their disease. Within my organization we decided to try changing the nomenclature. Our goal was to see if we could help our patients have a higher quality of life, spend less time in the hospital, and begin to prepare them for what the end-stage process of what their disease might look like. We experienced a change in the leadership of our care management team and decided to use this as an opportunity to develop new partnerships and change the way we deliver care to our patients with chronic diseases. As the CNO, one of our long-tenured ICU RN's came to me asking how we could start a palliative care program. He shared with me that we had a patient with a chronic disease that had dozens of admissions over a three year period. Upon speaking with the patient and the family he felt they did not have a realistic idea of what their disease progression would look like. This led to many admissions to the hospital including the ICU. I knew that we had to do something to better serve this patient population and empower our clinicians to see changes they believed would lead to increased patient satisfaction and Jonna Jenkins
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