NYT: Nursing Homes Confront New (Medicare) Drug Plan's Hurdles

[DeepModem Mom]

Nursing Homes Confront New Drug Plan's Hurdles
By JANE GROSS
Published: January 15, 2006


....The nation's frailest elderly take an average of seven medications a day, a financial burden on individuals, families, institutions and state treasuries that inspired the Medicare prescription drug plan, which took effect on Jan. 1 and is available to 42 million Americans over the age of 65.

Nursing homes like Sarah Neuman (in Mamaroneck, NY) are the first large-scale testing ground for the plan's confounding new bureaucracy. Here, the residents continue to get their medications, as recipients have not at some local pharmacies during the bumpy start-up of the plan, forcing state after state to declare health emergencies and pay the bills. But the problems play out in volume.

The tumult, largely invisible to residents, is in the back-office cubbyholes where the pharmacists, comptrollers, medical directors, information technology specialists, compliance officers and social workers try to make sense of 43 different drug plans, subsidized by the government but administered by private companies.

Lights burn way past business hours at Sarah Neuman, where six months of preparation, including a new computer system, has proven all but useless. Clarifications arrive from the federal government faster than even a team of professionals can keep up with them.

"Nobody at the moment understands what they're doing, and not for lack of trying," said Elaine Healy, the medical director at Sarah Neuman, the smallest of three campuses of the Jewish Home and Hospital Lifecare System....


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/national/15nurse.html