For Jersey City Medical Center, care navigators have begun to reach out to patients who are constantly in the emergency room for conditions that could be managed in other ways.
Another step Jersey City Medical Center has taken is predicting where emergencies will occur, given the time of year, day of the week and other factors. This system, called First Watch, allows the hospital to better appropriate its emergency services and save more lives. The system’s implementation has improved the hospital’s survival rate for cardiac arrest 30 percent. The hospital now has a 50 percent survival rate.
The Trenton Health Team, run by St. Francis Medical Center and Capital Health, both in Trenton, has taken to knocking on doors of those who frequent the ED, providing complementary preventative care before those patients have medical problems.
They patterned their strategy on a similar model, pioneered by the Camden Coalition. The Camden Coalition has been developing the idea of preventative care for ED super-users for the last 10 years, an endeavor for which the coalition’s founder, Jeffery Brenner, MD, received a 2013 McArthur Fellowship.
According to the article, New Jersey’s progress highlights the cost of not caring for patients outside of the hospital.
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