Quality and Safety
I’ve been noticing two reoccurring themes in medical real estate: satellite care clinics and consolidation of health systems and physician practices. Both of these issues correlate with the unknown long term effects of healthcare reform as hospitals implement provisions and transform their organizations into more efficient care entities.
When Steve Woods' wife was pregnant, he put on what he calls "sympathy weight." That was a dozen years ago. "She went back to her svelte, in-shape figure and I've maintained the sympathy weight," he said.
When it comes to improving your organization's patient flow, choosing the right tools is as important as developing the right plan.
As hospitals face penalties for readmissions, they are implementing programs to enhance care coordination to keep patients from returning to the hospital.
Better Health, a regional health improvement collaborative in northeast Ohio reported that hospitalizations for cardiovascular conditions addressed by its programs fell by 10.7 percent in 2011, building on declines in 2009 and 2010. According to Better Health this is first time a decline in avoidable hospitalizations has been reported as a result of a regional health collaborative's efforts.
On Tuesday, representatives from the Montefiore Medical Center in New York and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSM) discussed how regional collaborations can improve quality and reduce costs during a webinar sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ) Health Care Innovations Exchange.
FORTUNE magazine released its annual list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. This year, 12 companies in the healthcare industry made the list and a few of them shared some insights with Healthcare Finance News on why employees enjoy working for them.
Collaborative efforts, including tracking Medicaid beneficiaries who frequently use emergency departments and adopting electronic tracking systems to exchange patient information, are among the ways states can cut Medicaid costs, according to a new report by the Washington Health Care Authority (HCA).
A recent study published in the Journal of Nursing Care Quality found that improvement is needed when it comes to the participation levels of newly-registered nurses in hospital quality improvement levels.
A study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that having Quality Improvement Organizations (QIOs) to improve care transitions decreased hospitalizations and re-hospitalizations of Medicare beneficiaries by nearly 6 percent over two years.