Quality and Safety
An analysis of more than 4,100 U.S. hospitals shows less than 40 percent have the recommended stewardship programs in place to guide the use of antibiotics for patient care.
This prototype machine produces 1,000 pills in 24 hours, faster than it can take to produce some batches in a factory. Allan Myerson, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT and a leader of the effort, says it could become eventually an option for anyone who makes medications, which typically require a lengthy and complex process of crystallization.
Alerts Tracker, which augments its Automatch platform, automatically identifies equipment models and supplies within a healthcare facility's inventory that are impacted by an alert or recall, and notifies designated department staff.
The problems were traced to the compounding pharmacy lab at Paradise Valley Hospital in National City, California, where inspectors found "dust, stains and foreign material" in a supposedly sterile environment in which thousands of intravenous medications were prepared over eight months -- from Jan. 1 to Aug. 18.
The Senate on Tuesday approved $1.1 billion to fund the fight against the Zika virus, a figure short of the $1.9 billion requested by President Barack Obama.
Despite an overall drop in doctor's visits, emergency visits and hospital care, children's healthcare spending rose in 2014, according to a new report by the Health Care Cost Institute that claims rising prices bridged the gap in utilization.
Pamela Peele knows that people who subscribe to cooking magazines have a much higher risk of going to the emergency room. But how she knows that is a whole other story.
Instead of slashing jobs to cut costs and increase profits, hospitals should focus on delivering high-quality customer experiences to widen their margins. That's the word from a new study released by Accenture, which shows that hospitals who delivered superior customer experiences increased their net margins by 50 percent over average-performing facilities.
While public rankings from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and industry ones from groups like Leapfrog and Healthgrades, have raised awareness of hospital shortcomings in patient safety, and new report claims these programs fail themselves to stand up to scientific scrutiny.
An extra $73 billion was spent between 2010 and 2012 on brand name medications, according to a new study by JAMA Internal Medicine, and the practice of therapeutic substitution could help to drive down those costs, a new study suggests.