One of the chief problems with America's rising healthcare costs is that hospitals have a tendency to keep patients on for longer than necessary in order to bill for more care.
The Federal government has already taken strong steps to prevent this kind of behavior -- but as it turns out, the cure was, for some seniors, worse than the problem.
Suddenly, hospitals were ejecting people when they were just barely stabilized, because the profit margins for holding a patient were plummeting.
The issue became so dramatic that a recent study revealed that one in five seniors was readmitted to a hospital within 20 days of being released -- for the same problem they were originally admitted for! The Affordable Care Act ('Obamacare') aimed to reduce that number, as well as to improve care for seniors in the crucial post-hospital recovery phase.
To that end, the ACA created a program called the Community-based Care Transitions Program (CCTP) that does exactly what its name suggests: it helps seniors that are leaving hospitals to transition to 'community-based care.
' In other words, they manage a significant fund of money available to a large number of test communities, and they spend that money helping entrepreneurs build Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) that handle the transition from a hospital to any other form of caretaking.
Care Transitions A 'care transition' is the formal term for 'moving from one location that provides medical care to another.
' Care transitions have always represented a problem for the medical industry, because of the numerous ways in which vital medical information fail to transfer from one caretaker to another.
For example, at the hospital, you have a series of nurses, many of whom you see multiple times, and they take extensive notes about the details of your situation so that another nurse can step in without missing a beat.
But those notes are rarely made part of your official medical record, and even if they are, there is no guarantee that your next caretaker will receive a copy of your medical record in time to start care -- or at all! Because such failures of information can lead to lapses in care, care transitions require extra attention -- but all too often, neither the hospital you are departing nor the new facility you are moving to will take responsibility for completing the transfer.
Thus, the CBOs created by the CCTP take the job of care transitions, making it their sole job to ensure that your new facility and/or caretakers are the right people for the job, and that they get all of the information they need to properly care for you.
The Test Communities Because this is a test program, not every community -- and not even every major city -- has a CBO that can help with a care transfer.
If you're looking for one in your area, you can check the CCTP website map, which shows all 76 communities currently served by one or more CBOs.
The Federal government has already taken strong steps to prevent this kind of behavior -- but as it turns out, the cure was, for some seniors, worse than the problem.
Suddenly, hospitals were ejecting people when they were just barely stabilized, because the profit margins for holding a patient were plummeting.
The issue became so dramatic that a recent study revealed that one in five seniors was readmitted to a hospital within 20 days of being released -- for the same problem they were originally admitted for! The Affordable Care Act ('Obamacare') aimed to reduce that number, as well as to improve care for seniors in the crucial post-hospital recovery phase.
To that end, the ACA created a program called the Community-based Care Transitions Program (CCTP) that does exactly what its name suggests: it helps seniors that are leaving hospitals to transition to 'community-based care.
' In other words, they manage a significant fund of money available to a large number of test communities, and they spend that money helping entrepreneurs build Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) that handle the transition from a hospital to any other form of caretaking.
Care Transitions A 'care transition' is the formal term for 'moving from one location that provides medical care to another.
' Care transitions have always represented a problem for the medical industry, because of the numerous ways in which vital medical information fail to transfer from one caretaker to another.
For example, at the hospital, you have a series of nurses, many of whom you see multiple times, and they take extensive notes about the details of your situation so that another nurse can step in without missing a beat.
But those notes are rarely made part of your official medical record, and even if they are, there is no guarantee that your next caretaker will receive a copy of your medical record in time to start care -- or at all! Because such failures of information can lead to lapses in care, care transitions require extra attention -- but all too often, neither the hospital you are departing nor the new facility you are moving to will take responsibility for completing the transfer.
Thus, the CBOs created by the CCTP take the job of care transitions, making it their sole job to ensure that your new facility and/or caretakers are the right people for the job, and that they get all of the information they need to properly care for you.
The Test Communities Because this is a test program, not every community -- and not even every major city -- has a CBO that can help with a care transfer.
If you're looking for one in your area, you can check the CCTP website map, which shows all 76 communities currently served by one or more CBOs.
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