Home health care services have undergone tremendous growth in recent years thanks to increased need, Medicare reimbursement, improved technology, and preference for care at home rather than in the hospital. Criteria are listed for choosing the best agency for your patients' needs, in terms both of accreditation and certification factors and of specific services provided. Services may include home use of such sophisticated technologies as intravenous chemotherapy, total parenteral nutrition, and peritoneal dialysis; long-term assistance with daily needs for clinically stable patients; and home hospice care. Effectiveness and quality of care at home will be strengthened if you yourself participate in the operation of home health agencies at both advisory and policy-making levels.

Chronic Disease↗

PubMed1987

Perspective on home care.

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Health Maintenance Organizations↗

PubMed1983

What's behind the changes in today's hospital services?

Diversification and corporate restructuring have captured the imagination of more than a few hospital boards recently. In large measure, this movement can be explained as the attempt of health care facilities to cope with two seemingly contradictory sets of forces: one pulling patients out of the hospital and the other making patients who are placed in the hospital more dependent on its services.

Economic Competition↗

PubMed1981

The evolving role of the medical director.

The role of the medical director is one that has been evolving for several decades in response to changing circumstances within the hospital environment. This article traces the development of that role and attempts to clarify significant issues surrounding the role such as how the person in that post functions within the governance structure of the hospital.

Hospital Administration↗

PubMed1980

Directions of health system for new decade.

Hospitals will be fewer and larger and will offer only the most complex care/Ambulatory surgery, home care, and HMOs will play increasing roles in the delivery system.

Ambulatory Care↗

PubMed1979

Medical staff: physicians seek new responses to mounting pressures.

In responding to pressures to contain cost and improve the quality of care, medical staff are becoming increasingly involved in policymaking and managerial decisions.

Collective Bargaining↗

PubMed1979

The case for the medical director.

Seeking to fulfill their ultimate responsibility for quality of care, growing numbers of hospital boards have created the post of full-time, salaried medical director. Medical staffs have often resisted such a position, seeing in it a threat to cherished concepts of self-governance and an institutional balance of power. However, such a step is designed to enhance rather than control medical practice, and it will not inhibit physicians from playing an increasingly effective role in institutional affairs.

Governing Board↗

PubMed1978

Creative responses needed in controlled environment.

Faced with an increasingly regulatory environment, hospitals must find innovative ways by which, first, to survive and, then, to respond constructively to externally applied constraints. Decertification of beds and a move to ambulatory care programs are only two of many possible responses. The key to success will be the measure of cooperation between health care providers, insurers, and government.

Ambulatory Care↗

PubMed1978