Quality and Safety

One patient had bits of towels left in his stomach by surgeons, while another died after feeding tube was placed in their lung.

Move follows recent complaints that some highly rated nursing homes have numerous problems and face fines and other enforcement actions.

Here is the location and public contact information for the 405 accountable care organizations now enrolled in the shared savings program.

As 2014 winds down, we've taken a look back at some of the biggest stories in healthcare finance in the past year. See what you may have missed.

The number of accountable care organizations in Medicare's Shared Savings Program will grow by 89 in January 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid said this week, boosting the total participants to 405. Medicare ACOs will now serve more than 7.2 million patients.

There are two ways of thinking about, and therefore measuring, the rate of hospital readmissions, and they often lead to quite different results and quite different decisions on Medicare penalties.

UnitedHealthcare and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center are piloting an episode of care, or bundled, payment model for patients being treated with head and neck cancers, a collaboration they describe as among the first to use bundled payments in a large, comprehensive oncology center.

Poverty continues to have an effect on repeated hospitalizations -- a situation that threatens to cost health systems in higher Medicare readmissions penalties if post-discharge plans are not established.

More than 50 accountable care organizations across the United States took in millions in incentive payments in 2014 after exceeding savings benchmarks set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Hundreds of community health centers will receive more than $36 million from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for achievements in quality of care or the use of electronic health records.