Quality and Safety
This week, a Kaiser Health News analysis of Medicare data showed that 2,211 hospitals will face penalties in October for having too many patients readmitted for care within 30 days of discharge. Hospitals in several states react to this impending financial challenge.
Healthcare organizations are being more proactive in the prevention of burnout among their staff. After all, it's within a provider's best interest to keep expenses down around the well-being of their employees. "If employees leave a company, there's a cost to advertise and recruit. Providers lose out every single day there's an empty position," explained Tricia Pattee, product director with HEALTHeCAREERS, an online resource for both recruitment and job searches within the healthcare industry.
Just over a decade ago, members of Arkansas Children's Hospital's management decided to go to Disney World. It wasn't a fun-and-games trip, although fun was had. They went to learn about developing a culture that would support everyone working at the hospital and everyone using hospital services. Arkansas Children's was ahead of a trend recently taking hold in the healthcare industry: valuing customer service.
On the U.S. Department of Treasury's Go Direct campaign website is a countdown clock. It isn't counting down to the end of the Mayan calendar. And although some older adults may view the clock as ticking down to the end of the world as they know it, the Treasury Department and leaders of the long-term care industry say the deadline it's counting down to will begin a new era of increased efficiency and cost savings.
North Shore-LIJ Health System in metropolitan New York expects to save $8 million by sharpening its focus on labor. Jim Bosco, vice president of corporate human resources at the health system, recently discussed the benefits of its new workforce management technology with Healthcare Finance News Editor Rene Letourneau.
According to a study released Monday by The Commonwealth Fund and published in the August issue of Health Affairs, safety-net hospitals that currently rely on politically-negotiated funding will face significant financial reversals if they fail to change their business practices before the Affordable Care Act (ACA), deficit reduction programs and a weak economy force cutbacks in subsidies.
Despite all the innovations in the healthcare industry, the sad truth is that errors with wrongly prescribed medication are happening more than ever. Not only can this be costly for healthcare organizations, it can also have tragic consequences.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a proposed rule on July 3 that most medical devices distributed in the United States carry a unique device identifier (UDI).
Over the past few years and as we move into the future, many rural and critical access hospitals throughout the country have continued to struggle when it comes to rising costs of care and decreased reimbursements, as well as the recruitment and retention of high-quality clinicians and staff, among other challenges.
Fraud remains a stubborn and growing problem for the U.S. healthcare industry, raising costs for patients and cutting sharply into margins for insurance payers. Of the more than $2.5 trillion spent on healthcare in the United States annually, some $60 billion to $250 billion is lost to fraud, waste and abuse, according to industry experts. Organized crime groups and a small minority of healthcare providers commit most healthcare fraud, reports the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association.