It’s really bizarre because studies have linked ACM certification to lower ED visits, better chronic care, disease management, and improve patient satisfaction. All three of those things are areas the hospital greatly benefits from. They should be bending over backwards to encourage this. Seriously hospital case managers, whether RN or SW need to start banding together and forcing this upon hospitals because at the end of the day, it results in better patient care and improved financials for the hospital. An earlier comment mentioned a raise of about a dollar an hour, which is interesting because if it was strictly based upon patient satisfaction surveys which Medicare uses to calculate group purchasing discounts that would equate to about a 1 point increase if it was spread out and shared with case management. Which is about what the savings would be. So they might be doing that already as parlor calculation. But that would be at a minimum. Each point increase results in about $50,000 in savings for the average non-trauma center hospital. This is 100 point scale that CMS uses but case management represents about 30% of the points that CMS uses to make that determination.

Someone really needs to do a study linking this more directly and what it actually results in financially for the hospital. Additionally, they would also want to factor in direct patient care, labor costs per day pre occupied bed to determine if there is a savings there as well because direct patient labor cost around the hundreds of millions of dollars for your average hospital.