Quality and Safety
Newkirk Products, a provider of identification cards for insurance carriers, including BlueCross BlueShield, on Friday reported a data breach that may have exposed the personal information of 3.3 million members of insurance plans.
According to an analysis published Monday in Health Affairs, more than a third of the nation's hospitals in 2013 did not offer patients similar language assistance. In areas with the greatest need, about 25 percent of facilities failed to provide such services.
About one-third of patients over 70 years old and more than half of patients over 85 leave the hospital more disabled than when they arrived, research shows.
Because physicians who treat addiction don't necessarily have experience with surgery or access to sterile spaces, some are having to learn a new skill and develop new systems.
Advocate Health Care Network will pay $5.5 million to settle with the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights regarding multiple potential HIPAA violations that involved electronic protected health information, HHS announced.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has named the hospitals that will participate in their Frontier Community Health Integration Project Demonstration, also known as FCHIP, an initiative meant to increase access to healthcare in rural areas.
A Kaiser Health News analysis of the CMS data showed 1,621 hospitals having been fined 5 years in a row, earning payment reductions as high as 3 percent.
According to researchers at the University of Michigan, the more a hospital relies on its ICU to treat heart patients, the worse their results are, especially when it comes to 30-day morbidity.
Evidence suggests the technology can assist clinicians in earlier detection of patient deterioration, helping to reduce patient length of stay, minimize use of intensive care units, reduce falls and pressure ulcers and avoid cardiac and respiratory arrests.
Premier Inc. is joining forces with America's Essential Hospitals, which champions care for vulnerable populations, in a bid to improve quality, cost and population health at its member hospitals.