Workforce

Despite all the innovations in the healthcare industry, the sad truth is that errors with wrongly prescribed medication are happening more than ever. Not only can this be costly for healthcare organizations, it can also have tragic consequences.

Respondents to a 2011 AMN Healthcare survey indicate that healthcare professions are increasingly taking advantage of social media and mobile devices for job searching purposes and shifting away from some traditional job search methods.

At the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s ANI conference in Las Vegas in late June, I had the pleasure of attending a keynote speech given by Captain Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who successfully landed a plane on the Hudson River in January 2009, saving the lives of the 155 people on board.

David Rinehart, MD, a primary care physician at CaroMont Health Southpoint in Belmont, N.C., learned the importance of accountable care in just one patient visit. "I was seeing a 55-year-old patient who told me 'I'm doing much better now.' I was shocked to discover that he had recently been hospitalized for a perforated gastric ulcer, but we had no record of that - no fax from the hospital or anything. That's something that's just too important to not get communicated."

The business of healthcare is complex and is often not clearly understood by the patient or even by the medical office staff. Here are five steps that medical practices should take to help patients understand medical bills and be better prepared to handle them.

Survey respondents expect the trend of employers increasingly shifting health insurance cost to employees to continue.

According to a recent study published in the August issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, nurse burnout has been linked to higher rates of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), which therefore costs hospitals millions of additional dollars each year.

A new survey of 200 healthcare provider CEOs shows that nearly half haven't identified a potential successor to the top management spot at their organization and only 17 percent feel they have someone who is prepared to step into the top spot.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will penalize hospitals for readmissions beginning this autumn. As a result, many healthcare providers are taking a cold hard look at their bottom line in an effort to meet or exceed projected targets for the year. The difficult part, of course, is that each healthcare provider has its own unique challenges. There is no "one size fits all" solution.

In 2010, Arkansas hospitals contributed an estimated $10.3 billion to the state's economy and directly employed 42,300 people, according to a recent report published by the Arkansas Hospital Association.