Quality and Safety
Minneapolis-based health system Allina Health intends to work with Salt Lake City-based data warehousing company Health Catalyst on a 10-year initiative to build a new model for improving outcomes system-wide.
The Washington State Hospital Association this week launched a transparency website, giving the public access to information and ratings on the services it provides.
No matter what system is used for communicating patient information between physicians, it should be routinely assessed for deficiencies.
As 2014 winds down, we've taken a look back at some of the biggest stories in healthcare finance in the past year. See what you may have missed.
Our job in healthcare is to identify the at-risk populations we encounter, and the information, tools, and behaviors we need to mobilize to seal the cracks and effectively transfer patient information among the members of the patient's healthcare team.
The number of accountable care organizations in Medicare's Shared Savings Program will grow by 89 in January 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid said this week, boosting the total participants to 405. Medicare ACOs will now serve more than 7.2 million patients.
If we are to promote the safe and timely transfer of patients from one level of care to another or from one type of setting to another, we must broaden our view of the who, what, and how involved in achieving effective transitions of care.
There are two ways of thinking about, and therefore measuring, the rate of hospital readmissions, and they often lead to quite different results and quite different decisions on Medicare penalties.
UnitedHealthcare and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center are piloting an episode of care, or bundled, payment model for patients being treated with head and neck cancers, a collaboration they describe as among the first to use bundled payments in a large, comprehensive oncology center.
Poverty continues to have an effect on repeated hospitalizations -- a situation that threatens to cost health systems in higher Medicare readmissions penalties if post-discharge plans are not established.