Dr. Eric Coleman thought it was a prank at first. On Monday, a deep voice on the phone told him he was a winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, often called a “genius grant.” Half-a-million dollars, no strings attached. The award recognizes Dr. Coleman’s decades of work on the issue of “boomerang patients," people who get out of the hospital and then need to be re-admitted soon after. That's true for about one in five Medicare patients. It’s hard on them, and costs the health care system billions of dollars a year. Dr. Coleman developed his strategy to reduce re-admissions by going straight to patients and learning from them.
[Photo: University of Colorado]
