Publications by authors named "Melissa B Richardson"
Background: As healthcare systems strive for efficiency, hospital "length of stay outliers" have the potential to significantly impact a hospital's overall utilization. There is a tendency to exclude such "outlier" stays in local quality improvement and data reporting due to their assumed rare occurrence and disproportionate ability to skew mean and other summary data. This study sought to assess the influence of length of stay (LOS) outliers on inpatient length of stay and hospital capacity over a 5-year period at a large urban academic medical center.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose Academic healthcare systems face great challenges in coordinating services across a continuum of care that spans hospital, community providers, home and chronic care facilities. The Johns Hopkins Community Health Partnership (J-CHiP) was created to improve coordination of acute, sub-acute and ambulatory care for patients, and improve the health of high-risk patients in surrounding neighborhoods. The paper aims to discuss this issue.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: To support hospital efforts to improve coordination of care, a tool is needed to evaluate care coordination from the perspective of inpatient healthcare professionals.
Objectives: To develop a concise tool for assessing care coordination in hospital units from the perspective of healthcare professionals, and to assess the performance of the tool in measuring dimensions of care coordination in 2 hospitals after implementation of a care coordination initiative.
Methods: We developed a survey consisting of 12 specific items and 1 global item to measure provider perceptions of care coordination across a variety of domains, including teamwork and communication, handoffs, transitions, and patient engagement.