Only 15 percent of the pre-care map group went home that early. The use of the care map reduced cost and length of stay but maintained the overall quality of patient care. Patients traditionally remained intubated until the next morning. But by implementing one change in procedure, we decreased the patient's time in the I.C.U., decreased the amount of sedative given and decreased the total hospital stay. The team also found that the number of diagnostic tests performed on patients could be decreased without affecting the quality of care.
Patient satisfaction is much higher when they know what to expect and when.
It is the first study to focus on early versus late discharge of CABG patients nationally, according to researcher Patricia Cowper. They looked at patients with post-operative stays of 14 days or less and examined when the patients were discharged and what happened up to 60 days later. What Cowper and her colleagues found is that 6 percent of these patients were released from the hospital either four or five days after their bypass. And they concluded from the limited clinical information included in Medicare data that these patients did not have higher rates of readmission or death. But that was at the beginning of the effort to streamline their care, and since then pressures have increased.