Quality and Safety
As hospitals chase better patient ratings and health outcomes, an increasing number are rethinking how they function at night -- in some cases reducing nighttime check-ins or trying to better coordinate medicines -- so that more patients can sleep relatively uninterrupted.
St. Mary's Medical Center in Palm Beach, Florida on Monday said it was closing its pediatric cardiothoracic surgery program following a CNN report that pointed to abnormally high mortality rates for the procedure.
As the clinical-financial relationship tightens, hospitals may want to consider whether they have appropriately organized their staffing roles and relationships to take the greatest advantage of the trend.
Providers should use outcomes-based evidence to drive decisions about what they will continue to offer and what they won't, experts say.
Successful boards spent more meeting time discussing quality and performing and held more frequent performance reviews with middle management, according to Health Affairs study.
As hospitals acquire physician practices, administrators must be less "hospital centric" when it comes to setting benchmarks and reporting quality.
"Would incentives for improvement be greater if all pay-for-performance programs specifically considered improvement as part of scoring hospital performance?" authors ask.
Unless hospitals and other health care facilities begin cooperatively fighting the country's most aggressive bacterial-resistant germs, infection rates could increase as much as 10 percent over the next five years, hitting about 340,000 people annually, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report released this week.
The business listing site has teamed up with ProPublica to integrate data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services onto the business pages of more than 25,000 healthcare facilities in the United States.
The worst-offending hospitals will see their Medicare reimbursements slashed by as much as 3 percent, though many on the list will be penalized less than 1 percent.