Quality and Safety

Hospital giant HCA will pay $2 million to settle a whistleblower lawsuit alleging that medically unnecessary and substandard heart surgeries were being performed at Fairview Park Hospital in Dublin, Georgia, the U.S Department of Justice said Tuesday.

The hospital-acquired infections prevention market in the United States is expected to grow 7 percent annually until 2020, according to a new report by by research-based management consulting firm Pharmaion, driven by increases in infections and chronic diseases among the aging population.

Don Goldmann, chief medical and scientific officer for Institute of Healthcare Improvement, thinks the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services needs to change its methodology for ranking providers by their number of hospital-acquired infections as many respected hospitals are seeing payment reductions in the program.

Obesity is redrawing the common imagery of old age: The slight nursing home resident is giving way to the obese senior, hampered by diabetes, disability and other weight-related ailments. Facilities that have long cared for older adults are increasingly overwhelmed -- and unprepared -- to care for this new group of morbidly heavy patients.

There's a prescription drug abuse problem sweeping the United States, but fixing it will require a systematic change focused on how most health professionals prescribe drugs, rather than changing the practices of a few bad apples.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Monday proposed new rules to discharge planning requirements for long-term care hospitals, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, critical access hospitals and home health agencies.

As hospitals continue to look for ways to cut costs, a team at Stanford Medicine is looking at how facilities can shave dollars off medical device purchases.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services on Thursday updated the quality scores for 40,000 physicians who shared benchmarks under the Physician Quality Reporting System, despite outcry by the American Medical Association that the data is incomplete.

Kaiser Foundation Hospitals in Vallejo, California were recently cited by Cal/OSHA for safety violations after inadequate safety practices resulted in workers being stabbed by needles on multiple occasions.

Since 1993, 11 people have been killed in abortion-related attacks -- doctors, clinic staff, and last week, a police officer and two visitors in the line of fire at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. While the investigation continues into the shooter's background and motives, David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, says that stalking and harassment pose a much more common threat to abortion providers and their families.