Quality and Safety
Healthcare reform is fundamentally changing the way hospitals are run. A combination of crushing costs, government edicts and fierce competition for the millions of newly insured patients that will result from federal healthcare legislation is putting the patient front and center.
Emerging evidence suggests that patients and their surrogates frequently engage in massive denial when it comes to prognosis near the end of life. While understandable – denial is often the way that people remove the “less” from “hopeless” – it can lead to terrible decisions, with bad consequences for both the individual patient and society.
In an effort to control costs and get people covered by health insurance, the Affordable Care Act offers a number of options for covering low-income people. Among those options is the Basic Health Program, which some say will save money and others say will kill health insurance exchanges.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will need to place a lot of emphasis on implementing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the coming year, according to the Office of Inspector General's (OIG) annual summary of management and performance challenges facing the agency, released this week.
A recent New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) study points to a new pilot program that offers payment models that may encourage hospitals to better coordinate transitions of care, resulting in fewer readmissions.
In an effort to accelerate the development of innovative care models within their respective health systems, Piedmont Healthcare and WellStar Health System announced earlier this week the joint formation of the Georgia Health Collaborative, the first such organization in the state.
On Wednesday the acting U.S. Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank announced the four recipients of the 2012 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which includes one healthcare network.
With the intention of forming a collaborative network of 20 non-competing, not-for-profit health systems in the Southeast, WellStar Health System announced yesterday that it had acquired the trade name, trademark and other assets of the bankrupt Center for Health Transformation (CHT), a for-profit think-tank founded by Newt Gingrich.
There are significant benefits to creating a cross-functional workforce governance model that both promotes trusted employee relationships and enables a collaborative approach, said Kathye Habig Nippert, vice president of workforce management at Catholic Health Partners in Cincinnati.
Optimizing candidate flow is essential to successfully staffing frontline positions said an executive of a human and workforce services company during a session at the KronosWorks 2012 annual conference in Las Vegas Tuesday.