Best practices for heart failure: a focused review.

Heart failure (HF) is a progressive condition and is associated with high patient mortality rates and frequent hospitalizations. This article provides an overview of clinical, self-management support, and care transitions best practices for HF care in the home care sector. Clinicians armed with competencies in HF management are positioned to meet the 3-part aim of healthcare reform: improved health, better care, and lower cost.

The Community-Based Transitions Model: one agency's experience.

Home care providers have more than a century of experience providing complex patient care and medication management, symptom management, and disease self-management. These requisite home care clinician skills are common to those described of the "health coach" in most contemporary care transition models. When home care clinicians are re-tooled with health coaching competencies such as motivational interviewing, their role as the "perfect" health coach can be readily demonstrated.

Review series: Examples of chronic care model: the home-based chronic care model: redesigning home health for high quality care delivery.

Individuals with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) face significant challenges due to frequent distressing dyspnea and deficits related to activities of daily living. Individuals with COPD are often hospitalized frequently for disease exacerbations, negatively impacting quality of life and healthcare expenditure burden. The home-based chronic care model (HBCCM) was designed to address the needs of patients with chronic diseases.

The home-based chronic care model: a platform for partnership for the provision of a patient-centered medical home.

Even as the way forward for health care reform was recently thrown into turmoil, key players at Baptist Health Home Health and Hospice break down the components of true health care reform for patients with complex chronic conditions. For these individuals, a reformed system would improve and coordinate their care, base this care on the patients' (rather than the system's) needs, empower patients to self-manage their illnesses, and deliver care through physician-led, interdisciplinary teams. All of this would be done while reducing unnecessary costs in the system and helping patients achieve their best quality of life.

Creativity.

The psychological study of creativity is essential to human progress. If strides are to be made in the sciences, humanities, and arts, we must arrive at a far more detailed understanding of the creative process, its antecedents, and its inhibitors. This review, encompassing most subspecialties in the study of creativity and focusing on twenty-first-century literature, reveals both a growing interest in creativity among psychologists and a growing fragmentation in the field.

Home-based chronic care. An expanded integrative model for home health professionals.

The Chronic Care Model (CCM) developed by is an influential and accepted guide for the care of patients with chronic disease. Wagner acknowledges a current healthcare focus on acute care needs that often circumvents chronic care coordination. He identifies the need for a "division of labor" to assist the primary care physician with this neglected function.