Evolving Practice of Nursing and Patient Care

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NRS-440V Trends and Issues in Health Care Speech June 28, 2013 Obamacare. Health Care Reform. Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act (PPACA). Affordable Care Act (ACA). Whatever you call it, there is one meaning behind the name and that translates into health care for many more millions of people who need it here in our United States of America. According to the Institute of Medicine, there are more than 3 million nurses in this country making nursing the largest segment of health care providers. That is why nurses are among the leaders of health care change that is coming. One major transformation that the PPACA is calling for is to bring about wellness and health prevention instead of focusing on a diseased, problematic system because nursing practice centers around the patient, or holistic care (ANA, 2010). There are a few delivery models in which the RN or APNP will utilize to accomplish what the PPACA sees as the future of health care. Let’s talk about them now. Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are groups of doctors, hospitals, and other health care providers, who come together voluntarily to give coordinated high quality care to their Medicare patients. The goal of coordinated care is to ensure that patients, especially the chronically ill, get the right care at the right time, while avoiding unnecessary duplication of services and preventing medical errors. When an ACO succeeds both in both delivering high-quality care and spending health care dollars more wisely, it will share in the savings it achieves for the Medicare program (CMS, 2013). The medical home, also known as the patient-centered medical home (PCMH), is a team based health care delivery model led by a physician, P.A., or N.P. that provides comprehensive and continuous medical care to patients with the goal of obtaining maximized health outcomes. It is "an
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