Effective public health management lies in providing quality care that would be not costly as well. An example of a regulation that guarantees the fulfillment of the mentioned goals is the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, which attempts to reduce the rate of readmissions. Namely, the program aims to prevent repeated visits to hospitals “that happen within 30 days of discharge from the index … admission” (U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, 2019, para. 10). High-risk patient populations tend to be readmitted to hospitals more often and need specific attention from the health care providers. As such, “in 2018, 20 percent of adult hospital readmissions were associated with … septicemia, heart failure, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease” (Weiss & Jiang, 2018, para. 9). In this paper, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is viewed for providing evidence-based interventions for reducing hospital readmissions in this population.
COPD is a respiratory disease that needs quality care and requires a patient attentive to the hospital’s instructions. The high-risk group for this diagnosis is people with low income (primarily Medicaid payers) (Jacobs et al., 2018). The rationale for the readmissions is the inconsistency of treatment provided by hospitals due to stratification and poor communication, multimorbidity, and lack of medical knowledge among the patients (Press et al., 2019). More precisely, it is clear that patients with COPD use the services of public health institutions, which might provide inadequate care. Moreover, these patients usually have more than one disease that complicates their COPD and reduces the effectiveness of its treatment. Finally, clients do not follow the guidelines for maintaining health after hospital admission, since they were not formulated adequately. Thus, to reduce the rate of readmissions, there are several evidence-based suggestions. Namely, it could be recommended to enhance the provider-client communication so that the instruction for the treatment is more straightforward, address several diseases of the patient, and make good health recommendations (Press et al., 2019). As a result, the patient’s and health providers’ efforts would minimize the risk of repeated illness.
To conclude, it is necessary to manage readmissions in high-risk population groups by providing quality care and adequate treatment. COPD-diagnosed patients were examined as a group with a high readmission rate. The reasons for repeated hospital visits are insufficient care services. To reduce the readmissions, it was recommended to provide health guides for the patients, treat collateral diseases and not only COPD, and communicate with the clients more explicitly.
References
Jacobs, D. M., Noyes, K., Zhao, J., Gibson, W., Murphy, T. F., Sethi, S., & Ochs-Balcom, H. M. (2018). Early hospital readmissions after an acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the nationwide readmissions database. Annals of the American Thoracic Society, 15(7), 837–845. Web.
Press, V. G., Au, D. H., Bourbeau, J., Dransfield, M. T., Gershon, A. S., Krishnan, J. A., Mularski, R. A., Sciurba, F. C., Sullivan, J., & Feemster, L. C. (2019). Reducing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease hospital readmissions. Annals of the American Thoracic Society, 16(2), 161–170. Web.
U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. (2019). Hospital readmissions reduction program. CMS.Gov. Web.
Weiss, A. J., & Jiang, H. J. (2018). Overview of clinical conditions with frequent and costly hospital readmissions by payer, 2018. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Web.