Reducing Hospital Readmissions with Infection Control Measures

The hospital readmission refers to an occurrence when a patient is discharged from a hospital and his readmission takes place within a specific time – 30-day readmissions. The rate of readmissions affects the quality benchmark for the healthcare system and depends on various factors such as diagnoses, severity of illness, and the availability and quality of post-discharge care.

Increased readmissions could result inthe following situations:

• Unnecessary treatment expenditures
• Improper reimbursement for services
• Compromised professionally recognized standards of care.

A hospital's readmission rate is calculated to adjust the associated risks.A measure of a hospital’s readmission performance compared to the national average for the hospital’s set of patients with a similar medical conditions is the hospital’s excess readmission ratio.

Hospitals have been engaging a number of strategies to reduce preventable readmissions. These include providing improved care during the inpatient stay which leads to reduced risk of hospital acquired infections,more careful administration of patient medications and discharge planning with improved communication about follow-up care.One of the most effective ways to reduce readmissions is to deploy infection control measures in healthcare facilities.

By industrializing infection control workflows and implementing real-time patient monitoring, hospitals would be able to better identify high-risk patients and enable clinicians to proactively take appropriate action in real-time to reduce hospital-acquired infection so rout breaks on a population level.

Hospitals should implement strategies that can go across the continuum of care for effective reduction of readmission rates. Data connectivity and information sharing crucial for inter operability of patient data, will improve care coordination between healthcare personnel and disparate health information systems. 

Using Jvion’s RevEgis, providers can pin point high-risk patients and proactively intervene to provide appropriate care when needed. This helps healthcare facilities reduce readmissions, reduce length of stay related complications, and stop the loss of vital hospital resources while improving quality of care and in turn improved patient satisfaction.