Top 10 List of Social Admits Defined!

What is a social admit to the hospital?   A social admission is generally accepted by healthcare professionals to be a patient with no acute medical needs that is brought into a hospital because no safe discharge arrangements could be made at the time they presented. Most social admits involve elderly patients who present to an emergency room with weakness, have a thorough negative workup and are too weak to go home but have no where else to go. They might have a non surgical fracture limiting their mobility or a family refusing to take them home. Most social admissions occur after-hours when community services are unavailable to assist with a safe discharge.  Most patients are admitted through the ER by a Hospitalist to observation status, which often causes the patient to be readmitted a month later with a stroke or a heart attack when they get a bill for thousands of dollars in uncovered Medicare services. Most of the time, a social admit can be safely discharged within the next 48 hours, which happens to be the time Medicare will pay for observation status.  Occasionally, a weekend or a holiday throws a wrench in the plan and hospitals become default nursing homes until discharge can be arranged.On rare occasion, social admits stay weeks, sometimes months, in a hospital because no long term care facility will accept them.  Some patients, and their families in particular, have burned all the bridges in their community nursing homes and patients have no ...

Source: The Happy Hospitalist - November 9, 2014 Category: Internists and Doctors of Medicine Authors: Tamer Mahrous Source Type: blogs