Staff members publish article in international journal
Charleston, WV -Staff members of the West Virginia Medical Institute and Quality Insights of Pennsylvania have published an article in an international journal.
WVMI Director of Scientific Support Dr. Charles P. Schade is the lead author of the article, which will appear in the May edition of the International Journal for Quality in Health Care.
The seven-page article, “Impact of a National Campaign on Hospital Readmissions in Home Care Patients,” looks at the impact of the Home Health Quality Improvement National Campaign, a yearlong effort in 2007 to reduce the number of home health patients readmitted to the hospital. About 5,500 home health agencies took part in the effort sponsored by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and Quality Insights of Pennsylvania.
Quality Insights, which is an affiliate of WVMI, served as the Home Health Quality Improvement Organization Support Center in charge of recruiting home health agencies and developing materials to guide their efforts. Co-authors Eve Esslinger, Donna Anderson and Yinghua Sun, all of Quality Insights, along with Bethany Knowles of WVMI, worked on the campaign.
In mid-2008, Schade surveyed about 250 home health agencies, including some who had not participated in the campaign. In December, he wrote the article, which concluded that the home health agencies that adopted the campaign’s methods improved whether or not they signed up for the campaign, but participation alone had no bearing on improvement.
The peer-reviewed International Journal is published by Oxford Journals on behalf of the International Society for Quality in Health Care in Dublin, Ireland. Oxford Journals is an international academic publisher. It is a division of Oxford University Press, which is a department of Oxford University in England. The 500-year-old press is the largest university press in the world and one of the oldest.
Dr. Schade has published numerous articles. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Public Health and the American Journal of Medical Quality, among others. He earned a medical degree from the Baylor College of Medicine and a master’s in public health from the University of Texas.
To view an abstract of the article, visit http://intqhc.oxfordjournals.org/ and follow the Advance Access link.