Why Accreditation?
The Accreditation process helps the facility define and actualize its strengths, identify and improve weaknesses, and recognize opportunities to enhance processes. The review process provides a road map to indentify gaps, change processes, and starts the journey to improve cardiac patient care.
Benefits of Accreditation
- Improves quality outcomes
- Gives your facility a competitive advantage
- Streamlines processes that improve the quality of cardiac care and reduce waste
- Allows facilities to examine and benchmark their processes to the latest “evidence-based” best practices
- Reduces the liability of missed MIs through a consistent approach to risk stratification of the ACS patient based on research and best practices
- Provides consultation and on-site review of your processes by a team of experts
- Improves your bottom line
- Allows the facility to make business and clinical decisions based on metrics
- Establishes the facility’s commitment to higher standards
- Demonstrates to the community the facility’s commitment and dedication to providing exceptional cardiac care
- Improves relationships and integrates processes with EMS and Dispatch Services
- Creates a team approach to treatment; helps you get the best results from the resources already available at your institution
- Provides an adaptable and proven approach that can be used by hospitals
- Allows risk stratification of patients for placement in the most cost-effective and appropriate manner
Heart Failure Accreditation can help facilities avoid RAC issues
A federal audit program, commonly referred to as RAC (Recovery Audit Contractor) was created in 2003 to pay incentives to third-party contractors to identify and recover improper payments paid to healthcare providers in fee-for-service Medicare. Heart failure admission is one of the hospital services that has been targeted as an area of potential overpayment. Heart Failure Accreditation can help facilities avoid RAC issues in these ways:
- Facilities follow defined risk stratification protocols for patients to ensure appropriate placement based on the patient's clinical presentation and initial response to treatment.
- They consistently use standardized order sets to ensure appropriate documentation and evidence based care.
- Cost avoidance with frequent readmissions due to appropriate, discharge instructions, medication strategy, primary provider follow-up and education provided to patients.
- EMS documentation is included in claims appeals to further describe the patient's status.
- The process improvement approach used in the accreditation allows facilities to identify gaps, measure results and revise current processes as needed.
- Accreditation is associated with better performance of Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services core measures for acute myocardial infarction and heart failure.
- Bi PAP and CPAP protocols developed in collaboration with EMS decrease intubations and result in decrease hospital acquired pneumonias and higher acuity setting for care.
- Bring teams together to evaluate internal processes and break down barriers.
- Develop an educational plan to link quality patient care with RAC strategies including improved documentation
- Link professional coding staff with the clinical team by inviting them to daily patient rounds
- Differentiate observation short stay order sets — observation patients require more assertive treatment the front end but will result in decrease inpatient admissions if treated appropriately
- Collect metrics to assure your processes are meeting your goals both clinical and financial.
- Administrative support to assure barriers do not exist.
- Develop a multi- disciplinary team and multi skilled team including partnering with outpatients resources such as home health or ambulatory heart failure clinic to close the gap in the continuum of care and overcome barriers regarding patient compliance issues.