Quality and Safety
Seven years after Congress passed a landmark law banning discrimination in the treatment of mentally ill people, many families and their advocates complain it stubbornly persists, largely because insurers are subverting the law in subtle ways and the government is not aggressively enforcing it.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will lift the rate it pays inpatient hospitals in 2016 by 0.9 percent, the agency announced Friday, as long as facilities participate in the Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting Program and demonstrate meaningful use through the use of electronic health records.
The 25-bed Cochise Regional Hospital in Douglas, Arizona, is set to close at the end of July, after Medicare took the rare action of cutting off funding based on findings from several compliance and safety investigations.
Despite concerns about turning the obstetrical specialty into "shift" work similar to emergency physicians, the laborist trend is growing as hospitals seek to improve patient safety and physicians increasingly recognize they need help responding to emergencies.
Events included hospital and ED patients visits that could have been avoided under circumstances including better medication management, more timely.
While in comparison, no hospital on the U.S. News Honor Roll flat-out failed in other rankings, in many cases they received only average scores or didn't show up at all.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services quietly updated its database of hospital star ratings last week, and for many hospitals the news was good.
Though new transparency rules worried dialysis providers and prevention efforts are increasing, DaVita HealthCare Partners says the demand for the kidney-care services is still driving business forward.
Though antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" aren't new, their rise in U.S. healthcare institutions is leading hospitals to stock up on supplies to combat them.
Medicare applied the new quality measure to more than 9,000 agencies based on how quickly visits began and how often patients improved while under their care.