During his time working for one of the largest non-profit healthcare systems in the US, Dennis and the leadership team were tasked with lowering heart failure re-admission rates. For those who don’t know, a re-admission is defined a hospital-admitted patient whose previous hospital discharge was within the past 30 days. Ascension Providence Hospital, in Waco TX, had a 21% re-admission rate for all heart failure patients.
“While we all recognize that heart failure is a degenerative disease and having a re-admission rate of 0% is not realistic, I knew significantly moving the needle was a necessary goal. I began working with Case Management, pulling chart data together, mining the data, and finding variables that significantly impacted the probability of re-admission,” said Bruno.
Dennis Bruno, Senior Operations & Performance Improvement Executive
“I put these results together and presented them to the leadership team, then led the development of a best practice process for the entire care continuum. Utilizing collaborative physicians to influence leaders of third party providers and working with data analysts to build the necessary reports, the Nurse Navigators were then able to prioritize their patient workload,” Bruno continued.
After several hurdles with software, processes, structure and metrics, the overall Heart Failure re-admissions were reduced from 21% to 14% — an unprecedented drop in just 12 months.
The goals were realized, the process and outcome recognized nationally, and together, they all continued to build the improvement culture, resulting in the facility’s Leapfrog Hospital Safety Grade to surge from a C to a grade of A.
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