Quality and Safety

Bundled payments represent a new and increasingly accepted form of reimbursement. They can work now, if applied in modest, manageable ways from which lessons can be learned and applied more broadly later.

Value-based purchasing introduces the potential for unintended consequences, and needs to be monitored to avoid disparities between hospitals. But it's too early to claim that VBP puts disproportionate share hospitals at a disadvantage.

Almost a third of all hospitalizations now treat diabetic patients, and cost more than average. Diabetic admissions may be a problem that regulators, ACOs and providers need to solve for the long-term.

Quality measurement in healthcare has always been difficult and expensive. In fact, most of today's measures do not create enough value for actual healthcare users and, as a result, have little impact on improving care and lowering costs.

As patient outcomes become increasingly linked to reimbursement, hospital quality and finance teams must coordinate better than ever before. Deborah Larkin-Carney, vice president of quality at Barnabas Health, shares how quality and finance connect at her health system.

In a region brimming with high-ranked hospitals but still suffering from poor care coordination, four health systems are initiating a new joint venture to find efficiencies and lure payer partners.

There's a lot of buzz in the healthcare community about the right path to choose for accreditation and deemed status with CMS. For many years, The Joint Commission has been the number one choice, but Det Norske Veritas, a newcomer in 2008, is gaining significant ground.

Hospitals may have less control over readmissions than clinicians, administrators or federal regulators would like to believe, new research suggests, meaning that the readmissions penalties imposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services may be inappropriate.

Engagement is a big buzzword in healthcare these days. Every program seeks to achieve it; every provider wants to enhance it. But what is engagement exactly?

Most hospital administrators choose to implement vendor management systems to keep track of who is in the facility, what they are doing in the facility and to make sure the vendors have the training the organization wants them to have, but today's vendor management technologies allow for expanded uses.