St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson, N.J., developed a geriatric-specific emergency department and reported a fall in readmission rates from 20 percent in 2009 to 1 percent in 2010, according to the report.
However, setting up a geriatric-specific ED may not have any cost benefits. Implementing this specific service can cost anywhere from $150,000 to $3.2 million, and hospitals don’t receive any special reimbursement based on the type of emergency department, according to the article.
Robert Maliff, director of the applied solutions group at ECRI Institute, a healthcare research organization, said not all hospitals will financially benefit from geriatric-specific emergency departments. Geriatric-specific emergency departments only make sense for hospitals whose clinical and financial benefits outweigh the initial implementation cost, he explained.
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