Care-coordination program gets boost

The California HealthCare Foundation has pledged $280,000 to enable 20 hospitals to take part in an intensive training program aimed at improving care coordination and reducing preventable readmissions.

The hospitals, all located in California, will participate as mentor sites in Project BOOST, a program developed in 2008 by the Society of Hospital Medicine. The Project BOOST mentoring intervention, which costs $28,000 per site, incorporates one year of help from physician experts, project management tools, instructional videos, benchmarking and other resources to help hospitals lower their rehospitalization rates.

Although the program was initially created to improve care transitions for the Medicare population—BOOST stands for Better Outcomes for Older Adults through Safer Transitions—it has since been expanded to include all nonpediatric admissions, a Society of Hospital Medicine spokesman said.

Funding from the California HealthCare Foundation will cover about half of the program tuition for each site; each hospital will need to chip in an additional $14,500, according to a joint news release. Hospital recruitment began recently, the foundation and Society of Hospital Medicine said in the release.