Risk Management
A new study of the prevalence carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae in 16 Washington, D.C. hospitals claims the dangerous, drug-resistant superbug is very present in area hospitals and healthcare facilities.
These errors cause 250,000 deaths per year, falling behind cancer and the number one killer, heart disease, according to Johns Hopkins' researchers, Martin Makary and Michael Daniel in the report published Tuesday in the medical journal, The BMJ.
Between January 2010 and July 2015, the analysis found, inspectors identified 3,016 home health agencies -- nearly a quarter of all those examined by Medicare -- that had inadequately reviewed or tracked medications for new patients. In some cases, nurses failed to realize that patients were taking potentially dangerous combinations of drugs, risking abnormal heart rhythms, bleeding, kidney damage and seizures.
Stolen credentials, privilege misuse and miscellaneous errors were the three biggest causes for health data breaches in 2015, according to the 9th annual Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report released Tuesday.
While losses in the Obamacare exchange markets are chasing insurance giant UnitedHealthcare away, New England insurer Harvard Pilgrim Health Care says the exchange business is a major moneymaker.
Vermont led the country with 83 percent of hospitals earning 'A' grades while Maine and Rhode Island both came in second with 62.5 percent of hospitals earning top grades.
Nearly 800 hospitals earned the highest marks for safety in the Spring 2016 release of the Leapfrog Group's Hospital Safety Score, and report organizers say about 33,000 lives could be saved annually if every hospital performed that well.
The Leapfrog Group on Monday released its latest Hospital Safety Score rankings, assigning 15 hospitals with flunking grades for their record of incidents of patient harm and preventable death.
The Leapfrog Group on Monday released its latest Hospital Safety Score rankings, awarding 798 hospitals with top grades for their record of low incidents of patient harm and preventable death.
Five of the eight largest healthcare security breaches that occurred since the beginning of 2010 - those with more than 1 million records reportedly compromised - took place during the first six months of 2015, according to IBM X-Force's "2016 Cyber Security Intelligence Index."