Quality and Safety
Medicare on Dec. 20 disclosed bonuses and penalties for nearly 3,000 hospitals as it ties almost $1 billion in payments to the quality of care provided to patients.
Insurer Florida Blue and the Moffitt Cancer Center on Thursday announced the creation of an accountable care program that will focus on the treatment of cancer.
As a strategy to improve its patient satisfaction scores and re-establish the human-to-human connection between patients and caregivers, Steve Pu, DO, medical director at Twin Rivers Regional Medical Center in Kennett, Mo., helped establish an initiative called Sacred Moments in January 2012.
Researchers from global consulting company PwC say providers and insurers have ample opportunities, but also significant challenges in serving the roughly 30 million people who will become newly insured through Medicaid expansion and via the health insurance exchanges in the coming years.
With the increasing costs of a growing Medicare population and of an American population that is living longer but with more chronic disease, the U.S. healthcare system needs to utilize better care coordination and payment reform to keep costs down, according to a report from the American Hospital Association (AHA).
As lawmakers debate the ingredients of a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff, a long-term care membership organization offers a recipe for post-acute system reform that can be adapted for all sectors of healthcare.
The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) announced it was granting $40.7 million over three years to fund patient-centered comparative effectiveness research in the first four areas of its National Priorities for Research and Research Agenda.
Many safety-net hospitals that treat a higher number of lower-income patients than other hospitals are worried that the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) will have a disproportionate impact on their reimbursements due to their traditionally higher readmission rates. A new Commonwealth Fund analysis confirms those fears.
The Alliance of Specialty Medicine joined a number of other medical organizations as it called on Congress to permanently fix the flawed sustainable growth rate (SGR) Medicare payment formula as part of any legislation designed to avert the fiscal cliff.
A new tool created by ProPublica supports what nursing home auditors and researchers have been saying for years: federal fines vary widely by state. Nursing homes in some states pay a steep price for misconduct while those in neighboring states don't.