Government representatives working with Medicare are currently exploring the problems with boomerang hospitalizations for nursing home patients.
Failing to give appropriate care to a nursing home patient could lead to a nursing home neglect lawsuit.
One out of every five Medicare patients that are sent from the hospital to a nursing home end up back in the hospital or boomerangs back to the hospital facility within 30 days.
Unfortunately, many of the conditions that prompted this person to go back to the hospital could be subject to a nursing home neglect lawsuit.
These preventable conditions including medication errors, infections and dehydration were all explored in a recent federal records analysis.
These re-hospitalizations that might prompt a nursing home neglect lawsuit, apparently occur 27 percent more frequently than for the general Medicare population at large.
With hospitals sending patients out the door earlier, increasingly frail patients are now being sent to nursing homes in higher numbers.
Unfortunately, these nursing homes, which may have scant medical staff on board to help, often fail to deal with the complications that emerge after a person has been in the hospital.
Furthermore, a nursing home neglect lawsuit might be filed because the nursing home was responsible for failing to receive appropriate physician and hospital instructions or not following the instructions they did receive.
Nursing homes have, unfortunately, been rewarded by decades of various government payment policies which make it extremely difficult for patients to get the right care.
Since both nursing homes and hospitals receive financial incentives for these transfers, this means that the most vulnerable and frail patients are ping ponging back and forth between institutions often with lapses in their care due to the complications.
In 2013, hospitals began receiving fines from Medicare for high re-admission rates in order to decrease the chances of premature discharges and to encourage those hospitals to make proper referrals to nursing homes that had solid track records.
The revolving door, however, has led to many family members having to file a nursing home neglect lawsuit.
Medicare currently pays hospitals a set rate to care for a patient based on the average time that it takes to treat a patient with a similar diagnosis.
This means that hospitals profit by sending someone out the door sooner and lose money by keeping the patient even longer, even though an elderly patient with the possibility of complications might require several extra days.
Nursing homes also have their own financial incentives to hospitalize patients since keeping patients out of hospitals require speedy lab tests and frequent examinations; all of which can add cost to the nursing home facility.
If your loved one has already been affected by this back and forth hospitalization, you might have grounds to file a nursing home neglect lawsuit.
A nursing home neglect lawsuit should be handled by the experienced attorneys at McDonald Worley who do everything possible to seek the best outcome for the family members and the loved one who has been targeted by nursing home neglect.