The Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation (NMPC) Research and Development Department sponsored a major power quality study of two distribution feeders in the Buffalo, New York region. All levels of these systems, from the substation bus to the customer service entrance, were instrumented with monitoring equipment.A variety of measurements, encompassing both transient and steady state system behavior, were performed. The use of multiple monitoring locations allowed NMPC to assess the origins and scope of various disturbances. The study generated a database which can serve as a guide for assessing relative power quality on the NMPC system. The study also formulated suggestions on areas which the industry (both the power industry and consumer products industry) might address in the future on the effect of standard utility operation towards consumer appliances.
Purpose/Objective:
The Community-based Care Transitions Program (CCTP) defined a broad spectrum of interventions and services for elderly patients at high risk of hospital readmission. The purposes for a CCTP as developed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are to improve transitions of beneficiaries from the inpatient hospital setting to other care settings, to improve quality of care, to reduce readmissions for high-risk beneficiaries, and to document measurable savings. The goals for this CCTP initiative were as follows: achievement of a 20% reduction in the 30-day all-cause readmission rate across all partner hospitals compared with baseline; reduction in the 30-day all-cause readmission rate among the high-risk cohort served; and achievement of the target volumes for full enrollment.
Primary Practice Settings:
The partnership included acute care institutions and community-based care organizations that have been involved with care transition programs for years and have a long history of working collaboratively to provide services to a largely low-income, underserved, and ethnically and racially diverse target population.
Findings/Conclusions:
The program successfully transitioned to full operation within the first year of inception. To date, the partnership of the acute hospital setting and the community-based organizations has reached and provided services to nearly 8,000 total individuals, surpassing our target enrollment goal. To date, the readmission rate has decreased to 12.5%, which is an 11% decline since inception of the program.
Implications for Case Management Practice:
The collaboration of health care providers, social workers, nurse practitioners, physicians, community pharmacists, and the visiting nurses is integral to a successful transition from hospital to home. Home visits by the transition facilitators allowed for the coordination of a multitude of services in the community, including those previously available to patients in the past that have rarely been accessed. Including a pharmacist on the team provided teaching regarding medication adherence, medication management, and pharmacy services, which added to interventions to decrease future hospitalizations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.