Posted: 6/20/2016
Parkland Health & Hospital System has won a national quality award for reducing time and cost burdens on uninsured patients and freeing up hospital beds for individuals needing more acute inpatient care by teaching patients how to self-administer intravenous antimicrobial drugs at home.
America’s Essential Hospitals, a national group representing hospitals committed to high-quality care for all people, including the vulnerable, awarded Parkland the association’s 2016 Gage Award for quality. The association presented the award June 16 at its annual conference in Boston.
“Parkland exemplifies how essential hospitals use novel approaches to make more efficient use of scarce resources, improve care quality for vulnerable patients, and reduce the need for hospital readmissions,” said America’s Essential Hospitals President and CEO Bruce Siegel, MD, MPH.
Uninsured patients often cannot afford traditional outpatient options for antimicrobial therapy at an infusion center, a nursing home or home with a skilled nurse. So they often remain in the hospital for therapy, delaying their return to work and other activities of daily living and occupying beds that could be used for patients who require more intensive care.
In 2009, Parkland launched a project led by Kavita Bhavan, MD, Medical Director of the Infectious Diseases OPAT Clinic at Parkland and Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, to offer a fourth option to its uninsured patients: training them to self-administer intravenous antibiotics. To ensure safety, the hospital established a protocol that required the patients to demonstrate mastery of all steps of self-administration.
The five-year project found self-administered antimicrobial therapy to have similar or better clinical outcomes than provider-administered methods and a 47 percent lower hospital readmission rate among self-administered patients. The hospital also estimates it saved nearly 30,000 hospital bed days during the project’s first three years.
“This program is a prime example of transformative innovations that positively affect the quality of life for our patients while making the best use of limited resources,” said Fred Cerise, MD, MPH, Parkland President and Chief Executive Officer. “The self-administered antibiotics program saved 27,666 patient days at Parkland during the four years of the study – the equivalent of adding 26 beds. The uninsured patients go home earlier than they used to, and the hospital has saved nearly $40 million since the program’s inception.”
The Gage Awards, named after association founder Larry Gage, honor and share successful and creative programs that improve patient care and meet community needs. The Gage Award for quality recognizes activities that improve the quality of care delivered, or reduce or eliminate harmful events to individual patients or groups of patients.
To learn more about services at Parkland hospital, visit www.essentalhospitals.org.