A team led by a Johns Hopkins geriatrician has further noted hindrances to better care of seniors when they are transferred from hospital to rehabilitation center to home.

Using comments and concerns drawn from in-depth interviews of 18 physicians and two home health care agency administrators - all experienced in trying to coordinate care of older adults - the researchers created a framework for evaluating what actions and programs might improve care. For example, they say, more attention should be given to preventing drug errors or missed doses of medicine, earlier and more frequent communications among health care providers at different sites, the elimination of discharge planning delays, and patient education.
Moreover, they caution that strategies already planned or in use to improve coordination, such as pay-for-performance targets and educational interventions, need further study to determine their value and any unintended consequences.
Improving care transitions, for example, is a high priority in the Affordable Care Act of 2010, which established a pay-for-performance financial incentive program to motivate better coordination. The study results suggest, however, that health care providers are unclear about how these incentives will be designed and are concerned that the wrong outcomes or processes will be measured.
"For a pay-for-performance strategy to be successful and improve patient care, health care providers must have a voice in the design process," says report lead author Alicia I. Arbaje, M.D., M.P.H., director of transitional care research and assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "Currently, health care providers have concerns about pay for performance that need to be considered."
In their report on their work, "Excellence in Transitional Care of Older Adults and Pay-for-Performance: Perspectives of Health Care Professionals," published in the December 2014 issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, the investigators note the persistent "mixed reviews" of the impact of tying compensation to quality of care.
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The problems have been well documented in other studies, the researchers say, but they believe their assessment is the first to examine pay for performance from the perspective of health care professionals with frontline experience in transitional care.
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The findings suggest ways to better define health care providers' roles in care transitions, enhance communication, determine performance measurements, and improve education and training of providers. Among the recommendations in the framework are calls for holding health care providers more accountable for patient education, reimbursing providers for care coordination activities, and providing training and hands-on experience for providers to facilitate care transitions.
Arbaje explains, "Health care providers may need additional training to better execute care transitions and to understand their role during transitions. Without this education, it is difficult to design pay-for-performance strategies with an end result of good patient care."
Source-Eurekalert