Health Care Institutions - Hospitals

Health Care Institutions - Types Of Hospitals

There are more than sixty-five hundred hospitals in the United States that are described as short-stay or long-term, depending on the length of time a patient spends before discharge. Short-stay facilities include community, teaching, and public hospitals. Sometimes short-stay hospitals are referred to as acute care facilities because the services provided within them aim to help resolve pressing …

Health Care Institutions - Reasons For Hospitalization

The National Hospital Discharge Survey (NHDS) has been performed annually since 1965 by the National Center TABLE 3.2 for Health Statistics. The NHDS is the longest continuously running nationally representative survey of hospital utilization and is considered the preeminent source for national data describing the characteristics of patients discharged from nonfederal short-stay hospitals. Th…

Health Care Institutions - Surgical Centers And Urgent Care Centers

Ambulatory surgery centers, often called surgicenters, are equipped to perform routine surgical procedures that do not require an overnight hospital stay. A surgical center requires less sophisticated and expensive equipment than a hospital operating room. Minor surgery, such as biopsies, abortions, hernia repair, and many cosmetic surgery procedures, are performed at outpatient surgical centers. …

Health Care Institutions - Long-term Care Facilities

Families are still the major caretakers of older, dependent, and disabled members of American society. The number of people age sixty-five and older living in long-term care facilities such as nursing homes, however, is rising because the population in this age group is increasing rapidly. Even though many older people now live longer, healthier lives, the increase in overall length of life has in…

Health Care Institutions - Mental Health Facilities

In earlier centuries, mental illness was often considered a sign of possession by the devil or, at best, moral weakness. A change in these attitudes began in the late eighteenth century, when mental illness began to be perceived as a treatable condition. It was then that the concept of "asylums" was developed, not simply to lock the mentally ill away, but also to provide them with &#…

Health Care Institutions - Home Health Care

The concept of home health care began as post-acute care after hospitalization, an alternative to longer, costlier lengths of stay in regular hospitals. Home health care services have grown tremendously since the 1980s when prospective payment (payments made before, rather than after, care is received) for Medicare patients sharply reduced hospital lengths of stay. During the mid-1980s Medicare be…

Health Care Institutions - Hospice Care

In medieval times hospices were refuges for the sick, the needy, and travelers. The modern hospice movement developed in response to the need to provide humane care to terminally ill patients, while at the same time offering support to their families. An English physician, Dame Cicely Saunders, pioneered the hospice concept in Britain in the late 1960s and helped introduce it in the United States …

Health Care Institutions - Managed Care Organizations

Managed health care is the sector of the health insurance industry in which health care providers are not independent businesses run by, for example, private medical practitioners, but by administrative firms that manage the allocation of health care benefits. In contrast to conventional indemnity insurers that do not govern the provision of medical care services and simply pay for them, managed c…