You might think that having three hospitals in one city — not to mention a slate of nonprofits that all go after the same pool of donors — would create a hotbed of muggy competition.
Not in Glendale, where a coalition of hospitals and service providers are teaming up in an effort to cut down on the number of patient readmissions. Now, the collaboration — spearheaded by the Glendale Healthier Community Coalition — has been singled out by the Health Services Advisory Group of California as a model for how stakeholders can work together to solve a shared problem.
The benefit to Glendale is technical assistance from the advisory group on researching the issue.
More than 20% of high-risk hospital patients in Glendale are readmitted within 30 days of being released, according to a recent report to the coalition. About 40,000 patients are discharged from local hospitals each year.