Redd had been admitted to Mount Sinai Hospital in New York seven times over six months, spending 24 days there for conditions ranging from kidney failure to high blood pressure and diabetes. Each time she was released, Redd would later miss doctor’s appointments and skip medications only to wind up back in the emergency room for basic care.
“I was living on the edge,” said Redd, a 53-year-old from Harlem. “I wasn’t used to going to the doctor.”
Then Redd, like more than 600 other Mount Sinai patients over the past three years, was singled out as a high-risk patient and assigned to one of 27 social workers focused on keeping patients out of the hospital. Mount Sinai created the program after the Affordable Care Act set up an incentive system to provide hospitals extra money for keeping people healthy, and penalize them for having too many patients readmitted too soon.
Mount Sinai said the program reduced admissions 43 percent and cut emergency room visits 54 percent during a test run from September 2010 to May 2012. The decision to target high-risk patients is estimated to have saved $1.6 million in medical costs over a six-month period, the hospital said.
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In Redd’s case, she said the program may have saved her life. Since May, when she started working with a hospital social worker, she has been admitted to Mount Sinai just once, is regularly going to dialysis and on the waiting list for a new kidney.
Date: Sep 25, 2013