Manatt Health Managing Director Eboné Carrington co-authored an article for BMJ Quality & Safety on the importance of systematically identifying and mitigating risks in hospitalized patients with chronic health conditions, particularly Parkinson’s disease.
Often, the focus for patients admitted to the hospital is the single diagnosis that they were admitted for, which overlooks any chronic conditions that may increase their risk of harm. The authors offer a framework to help mitigate these risks, including to identify combinations of diagnosis and patient characteristics that create the highest risks as well as to identify high-risk patients as close to admission as possible. “As the number of hospitalized patients with chronic disease increases, we must accelerate efforts to identify the interactions between the admitting diagnosis and chronic disease and the risk of harm and to implement risk reduction strategies such as standard protocols or EMR-based checklists for patients admitted with a chronic disease regardless of admitting diagnosis,” the authors wrote.
The article described five interventions to perform in the hospital for patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) that are intended to improve care and decrease unintended harm for this population. These five recommendations were developed through a collaborative effort involving the Parkinson’s Foundation and three health systems. Learn more about how the Parkinson’s Foundation is working to improve care for PD patients and advance research toward a cure here.
BMJ Quality & Safety subscribers can read the full article here.