Group Health Cooperative Reduces Readmits with Active Clinical Care Tools and Nurse Care Manager Training
April 06, 2010
Seattle-based Group Health Cooperative provides services for urban and rural populations in Washington and Idaho, including patients with complex or comorbid conditions. As experienced case managers retired, general-practice nurses had to effectively manage patient care workflow, a specialist job for which they weren't trained.
To address these challenges, Group Health developed a comprehensive, complex-case management program for its rural patients, then expanded and adapted the program to cover all patients.
Using national, evidence-based clinical guidelines and powerful software, the Group Health program allowed new nurse case managers to focus on patient-recovery steps that would most impact how well patients progressed, helping the nurses to uncover issues that might slow recovery or lead to readmission.
Group Health gave all nurse case managers interactive software with the clinical guidelines, ensuring that evidence-based care would guide patient recovery. These tools enabled general-practice nurses to become case managers, helping them to quickly build detailed care plans to manage any case.
With these case management tools, a nurse could pay attention to the patient, being alert to possible patient misunderstanding, while the guidelines provided national standards for efficient and effective care. Backed by these broadly accepted guidelines, Group Health's new nurse case managers can help patients move through each step of the care continuum, and reduce readmit rates for its nearly 600,000 members.
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