Collaboration

Leadership alignment, is a HMCwiki collaboration. Please review, edit, or add your opinion.

Topics of greatest interest

• How to harvest ideas
• The relationship between productivity and quality
• Management of the supply chain
• Achieving Magnet status
• Improving copay collection
• Utilizing Rapid Response Teams

-view the most popular HMCwiki pages

Articles

• Hospital Pastoral Services departments
• Preparing for an unannounced JCAHO survey
• Communication in the NICU
• Respiratory Therapy
• Pneumonia management
• Malpractice insurance

Create an article
-newest additions

Blogs

• The Return on Knowledge (The ROK)

A Rapid Response Team (RRT), also known as a Medical Emergency Team (MET) or Medical Response Team (MRT) is a team of clinicians who bring critical care expertise to the patient bedside. They are small but powerful teams designed to intervene with patients before they develop serious medical problems. Today, more than 2200 US Hospitals use Rapid Response Teams.

Early Intervention to Avoid Adverse Events

Life-threatening events such as cardiac arrest often have as much as six hours of warning time. An RRT brings experienced clinicians to the patient bedside to pro-actively address these warning signs rather than waiting for an event to occur and reacting to it.

The Team may be summoned at any time by any employee of the hospital to assist in the care of a patient who appears acutely ill, before the patient has a cardiac arrest or other adverse event.

Encouraging Results and Proposed JCAHO Patient Safety Goal

Rapid Response Teams are a fairly new concept in the US. These teams have been shown to reduce potential adverse events and save lives. Baptist-Memphis hospital in Tennessee was an early adopter of Rapid Response Teams in the US, beginning in 2003. They have seen a 28% drop in codes since implementing RRT’s at their facility, and a reduction of transfers to ICU from 82% to 46%. Due to these types of results, the use of RRTs are a proposed JCAHO Patient Safety Goal. (continued...)

...that over the last decade, if the U.S. healthcare sector had kept pace with the U.S. non-farm business sector in productivity, we would have seen little or no price increases, better outcomes, and no funding crises for either Medicare or Medicaid?

...that the estimated cost to a hospital for losing a physician is about $250,000?

...that low-dollar co-pays and deductibles can be charged to a patient’s home or cellular telephone bill, resulting in collection cycles of 60 to 75 days and average monthly post-discharge collection rates of 70 to 85%?

...that earlier this year an Australian medical journal published results of a clinical trial in which there was a 50 percent drop in adverse events and a 36.9 percent reduction in the post-operative hospital mortality rate at a medical center that had begun using such a Rapid Response Team?

...that hospitals can overpay suppliers from 2 to 7 percent for contracted medical-surgical supplies?

...that gainsharing programs allow physicians to share in supply cost saving through some combination of percentage of payment, hourly fee, or fixed fee and to play a significant role in the planning process to achieve those savings?

...that with the reporting results of patient outcomes by hospitals through public databases, and theoretically, payers being able to research the same results, effective clinical management of pneumonia patients has moved front and center in the minds of clinicians and administrators?

...that preparing your staff for JCAHO, through repeated tracers and other educational methods, is the surest way to put your best foot forward?

...that while a high-risk case management model may focus on persons with a high risk of becoming seriously ill due to a combination of medical, social and functional problems, a Disease Management Case Management model addresses standard, evidence-based needs related to a specific diagnosis?

...that the government released a report suggesting that JCAHO was not doing their job to assure patient safety?

...that Setting up a committee tied to nursing and research is a great way to achieving Magnet status as well as research initiatives together?

...that although malpractice premiums have risen to 15-30 percent around the nation, the rise varies greatly by state with some of the hardest hit states seeing a 26-73 percent increase?