Quality and Safety
A study published in a recent issue of Medical Care found that increased nurse-to-patient staffing ratios and good work environments for nurses were tied to lower 30-day readmission rates for Medicare patients suffering from heart failure, myocardial infarction and pneumonia.
I was recently speaking to the clinical leaders of a mid-sized hospital, and a senior administrator posed the question, “should we require our doctors and nurses to get flu shots?” The answer, I said, is yes, and it isn’t just to prevent the flu.
Last week the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it will not challenge a proposal by the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA) to offer a gainsharing program to its member hospitals in the state.
Becoming a behavioral health home is a real opportunity but comes with some challenges. A webinar offered by SAMHSA/HRSA outlined some operational considerations for behavioral health agencies thinking about making the transformation.
If hospitals launching health plans strikes some as a sign of traditional health insurance's coming extinction, the business model so many American hospitals were built upon -- fee-for-service -- is declining too. Integrated healthcare and shared savings contracts between payers and providers are going to become the norm.
In a recent report released by the Leapfrog Group and published in Health Affairs, researchers found that there hasn't been a lot of progress over the years when it comes to hospitals meeting certain safety standards.
On Tuesday, Maine Gov. Paul LePage announced at a press conference a plan to repay Maine hospitals the $186 million owed to them by the state for patients covered by Medicaid.
In a report released last week, the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System describes a set of three healthcare policies that could slow health spending by $2 trillion over 10 years by focusing on the way public and private purchasers pay for healthcare, enhancing consumers' choices of higher-value care and streamlining administrative procedures.
Many IT managers focus mainly on external data security, but this is not the only area where attention is needed. Protecting systems from internal vulnerabilities is also critical to minimizing security risks and the costly penalties that often result from them.
On Jan. 1 2013, 106 new accountable care organizations began participating in the Medicare shared savings program, as federal health officials try to show that new health reform programs powered in part by better IT are starting to reap financial benefits.