Quality and Safety

Last week, Consumer Reports released new safety scores for 2,591 U.S. hospitals. The magazine is just one of a number of organizations that rates hospitals on safety. Should hospitals care about all these rankings?

The quality of a hospital or health system is usually linked to patient outcomes, not to administrative or financial efficacy. But smooth interactions between patients and the hospital business office should also be viewed as critical to an organization's quality, says one CFO.

Hospitals are just beginning to catch on to the promise of integrated data analytics to manage patient population health and measure treatment outcomes. These benefits not only assist the transition toward patient-focused care, they're helping healthcare institutions reduce associated costs.

Critical access hospitals in five states are facing a spring deadline to apply for participation in a federal program aiming to develop and test new models of integrated, coordinated healthcare in rural communities.

It's the rare hospital C-suite executive who doesn't worry about the federally-mandated financial penalties that can result from not reining in avoidable 30-day readmissions. Several potentially useful solutions to this costly problem have sprung up recently.

Since 2008 when CMS first implemented the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey for U.S. hospitals, the scores from these surveys have become increasingly more important to hospital executives as a measure of quality. They are now used to determine 30 percent of the total incentive under the Hospital Value Based Purchasing program.

Last month, Paul R. Bengston, CEO of Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital, a small, critical access hospital located in St. Johnsbury, Vt., was chosen to lead the American Hospital Association's Section for Small or Rural Hospitals in 2014. The 21-person governing council represents small or rural hospitals in the AHA's policy process and member services initiatives.

Although highly touted, the patient-centered medical home model failed to lower use of services or total costs and produced little quality improvement over three years, research in the latest Journal of the American Medical Association has found.

Since the recession first began in 2008, hospitals and health systems have continually seen a drop in inpatient volumes. Most industry experts say they expect more of the same for the rest of 2014 and even the next five years or so.

Medicare accountable care organizations are having varying rates of success in addressing their patients' diabetes and heart disease, according to government data released Friday.