Question

Your health system has been looking at reducing healthcare costs. One of the areas they are looking at is by reducing readmission rates, and there are other areas that can be cut as well. As a healthcare informaticist, how do you go about helping the system decide on how to reduce costs? Please answer the question at least 2-4 pages long with references

Answer 1

In order to reduce health care costs, as a healthcare informatics:

• As reducing readmissions is the first point as hospitalization is extremely expensive and incidence of readmissions is quite increasing which in turn affects the healthcare cost.
• Ways to reduce readmissions:

1. Proper Medication Therapy Management (MTM): Patient should receive a medication review upon admission and discharge from hospital, bedside medication delivery, medication education and counseling, and regularly scheduled follow-up support by phone and online.
2. Patient education:The most effective patient education programs seek to improve compliance, health literacy and self-management by reinforcing methods of self-care, regular follow-ups via phone and a physician visit 5-7 days after discharge.
3. Regular follow up & monitoring: Hospitals need to stay in close contact with patients after discharge through frequent phone calls as well as encouragement and reminders to keep scheduled appointments.
4. Home health care services: Health care services at home provides early detection.

Other than readmission to reduce healthcare costs, other ways includes:

• Faster time to treatment: With today’s huge patient loads, treating patients sooner saves both lives and healthcare costs.
• Improved physician performance in delivering high quality care: The ability to capture and analyze physician data is having a major impact in optimizing patient outcomes while reducing healthcare costs.
• Risk stratification: When these potentially costly patients are grouped and categorized or “stratified” as to risk, physicians can target higher-risk patients and intervene early on to prevent complications and costly hospitalizations.