Quality and Safety
Government Health IT Editor Tom Sullivan spoke with Bill Bernstein, chairman of the healthcare division at law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, which works with states and providers on health IT and related public policy issues, on the implication of the Supreme Court's ACA ruling and how it affects how the law will ultimately play out, health IT projects, and the impact it could have on Republican presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, who has been stumping on ACA repeal.
In 2010, Scott Hawig, chief operating officer at Duke University Health System, and Jim Bohnsack, executive vice president of product development at Transunion Healthcare, decided to analyze the behavior, demographic and financial makeup of one hospital system's patient population against service lines to determine how to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs at the same time.
The Alaska Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) -- the state's Medicaid agency -- has agreed to pay $1.7 million to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to settle possible violations of the HIPAA Security Rule, making it the second largest settlement for HIPAA violations to date.
Over the last seven months, St. Joseph Health System (SJHS), a large healthcare organization located in California and western Texas, has been using a multi-disciplinary approach to engage its physicians and clinicians in understanding the impact of clinical practice patterns and resource variability.
The future of the nation's largest health insurance program -- Medicaid -- hangs in the balance of the Supreme Court's decision on the 2010 health law.
In central Pennsylvania, Capital BlueCross and PinnacleHealth recently announced an accountable care arrangement (ACA), that officials with both organizations say is similar in design to the Medicare-based accountable care organizations (ACOs) being promoted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
The healthcare provider community must make changes to the delivery of care in order to meet the challenges currently facing the industry and the nation. That will be the central message Brent James, MD, chief quality officer and executive director of the Institute for Health Care Delivery Research at Intermountain Healthcare delivers during his speech "Clinical Transformation and Increasing Value," at the Healthcare Financial Management Association's ANI conference in Las Vegas at 2:45 p.m. on Monday, June 25.
Creating specialized hospital units for elderly people with acute medical illness could reduce national healthcare costs by as much as $6 billion a year, according to a recent study by University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) researchers.
Harvey Riceberg, inpatient pharmacy supervisor at the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada tells Healthcare Finance News Editor Rene Letourneau how the organization saved $750,000 in drug waste costs by implementing a new technology into their drug administering process.
Last week, Kimberly-Clark Health Care announced the four recipients of the second-annual HAI WATCHDOG Awards, created to recognize the efforts of healthcare professionals working together to prevent healthcare-associated infections (HAIs).