Acute Care
According to an analysis published Monday in Health Affairs, more than a third of the nation's hospitals in 2013 did not offer patients similar language assistance. In areas with the greatest need, about 25 percent of facilities failed to provide such services.
About one-third of patients over 70 years old and more than half of patients over 85 leave the hospital more disabled than when they arrived, research shows.
Premier Inc. is joining forces with America's Essential Hospitals, which champions care for vulnerable populations, in a bid to improve quality, cost and population health at its member hospitals.
The federal government will punish more than half of the nation's hospitals -- a total of 2,597 -- for excess readmissions by withholding more than half a billion dollars in Medicare payments over the next year, records released Tuesday show.
A report in 2012 by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse revealed that medical schools devoted little time to teaching addiction medicine -- only a few hours over four years. Since then, the number of Americans overdosing from prescribed opioids has surpassed 14,000 per year, quadrupling from 1999 to 2014.
The study, published online by the journal Pediatrics, reviewed the medical records and conducted interviews with clinicians and parents of 305 children who were readmitted within 30 days to Boston Children's Hospital between December 2012 and February 2013. It excluded planned readmissions such as those for chemotherapy.
The federal government released its first overall hospital quality rating on Wednesday, slapping average or below average scores on many of the nation's best-known hospitals while awarding top scores to many unheralded ones.
University Hospitals in Cleveland recently became the first institution in Ohio to treat a patient using proton therapy. Their patient, a 24-year-old woman with rhabdomyosarcoma, was the first in the state to receive such care.
AHA among groups concerned that the methodology used does not account for socioeconomic factors affecting patient outcomes.
Hospital merger and acquisition activity swelled by 6.1 percent over 2015, according to a new analysis from strategic and financial services firm Kaufman Hall and Associates. It identified 52 hospital and health system transactions during that time, compared to 49 transactions recorded during the same period in 2015.