Quality and Safety

Despite an overall drop in doctor's visits, emergency visits and hospital care, children's healthcare spending rose in 2014, according to a new report by the Health Care Cost Institute that claims rising prices bridged the gap in utilization.

Pamela Peele knows that people who subscribe to cooking magazines have a much higher risk of going to the emergency room. But how she knows that is a whole other story.

Instead of slashing jobs to cut costs and increase profits, hospitals should focus on delivering high-quality customer experiences to widen their margins. That's the word from a new study released by Accenture, which shows that hospitals who delivered superior customer experiences increased their net margins by 50 percent over average-performing facilities.

While public rankings from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and industry ones from groups like Leapfrog and Healthgrades, have raised awareness of hospital shortcomings in patient safety, and new report claims these programs fail themselves to stand up to scientific scrutiny.

An extra $73 billion was spent between 2010 and 2012 on brand name medications, according to a new study by JAMA Internal Medicine, and the practice of therapeutic substitution could help to drive down those costs, a new study suggests.

iVantage Health Analytics on Monday named its top 100 critical access hospitals and the top 100 rural and community hospitals in the nation for their high scores in terms of patient satisfaction and financial stability.

In addition to faring well in terms of patient satisfaction, the hospitals are also operating on firm financial ground.

While may rural hospitals are closing, some facilities are excelling at care and finances alike.

When Leapfrog released their Spring 2016 patient safety grades recently, 15 hospitals got slapped with a very public 'F' grade casting a spotlight on them that no institution wants. But with more patients weighing public hospital grades, experts, as well as a few hospitals which have faced down bad grades, say denial is the last thing a poorly marked hospital should do.

The vice president took to the stage at Health Datapalooza not just to share his own experiences, but to put out a call to action: While the government has taken great strides to increase access to technology-enabled healthcare, it's still not enough, he said.