Quality and Safety
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a highly regarded teaching hospital in Boston, but in 2012, the hospital found out it had one of the highest rates of readmissions among Medicare patients in the country. That meant federal fines of more than $1 million -- and a lot of soul searching for the staff.
Last week, Consumer Reports released new safety scores for 2,591 U.S. hospitals. The magazine is just one of a number of organizations that rates hospitals on safety. Should hospitals care about all these rankings?
Avoiding readmissions penalties has an obvious and direct impact on a healthcare organization's revenue. In an effort to improve patient care and keep your organization's revenue healthy, effective communication is essential.
The quality of a hospital or health system is usually linked to patient outcomes, not to administrative or financial efficacy. But smooth interactions between patients and the hospital business office should also be viewed as critical to an organization's quality, says one CFO.
Managing ambulatory care used to be about taking care of patients while managing your budget. Those days will have to change to stay competitive with the new payment model.
Hospitals are just beginning to catch on to the promise of integrated data analytics to manage patient population health and measure treatment outcomes. These benefits not only assist the transition toward patient-focused care, they're helping healthcare institutions reduce associated costs.
Critical access hospitals in five states are facing a spring deadline to apply for participation in a federal program aiming to develop and test new models of integrated, coordinated healthcare in rural communities.
It's the rare hospital C-suite executive who doesn't worry about the federally-mandated financial penalties that can result from not reining in avoidable 30-day readmissions. Several potentially useful solutions to this costly problem have sprung up recently.
Since 2008 when CMS first implemented the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey for U.S. hospitals, the scores from these surveys have become increasingly more important to hospital executives as a measure of quality. They are now used to determine 30 percent of the total incentive under the Hospital Value Based Purchasing program.
Last month, Paul R. Bengston, CEO of Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital, a small, critical access hospital located in St. Johnsbury, Vt., was chosen to lead the American Hospital Association's Section for Small or Rural Hospitals in 2014. The 21-person governing council represents small or rural hospitals in the AHA's policy process and member services initiatives.