Operational Excellence
Boards have a keen interest in quality, and they are helping their hospitals and systems to implement a variety of improvement strategies. One particularly effective tactic is building successful partnerships with patients and families by including patient and family advisers. A new guide from the…
Nearly every day, the news brings word of another data breach at a major corporation. Hospitals and health systems are not immune to this danger, and more importantly, they are part of the United States’ critical infrastructure — that is, their systems and assets are considered so vital…
One of the first — and sometimes only — place patients experience a hospital is the emergency department, where many first and lasting impressions are made. It’s known as the hospital's front door, but the ED is also the front line of care, concierge desk and the gateway through…
Snapshot Renovations and new construction are adding value to patient care by building in operational efficiencies, increasing patient convenience and creating opportunities for clinical collaboration.
Snapshot Successful shared savings and gainsharing programs are based on controlling costs. But incentives are structured and distributed in different ways, and they require separate strategies for physician alignment.
A primary care department is a unit or clinic within a hospital that provides such primary care services as general pediatric care, general internal medicine, family practice and gynecology through hospital-salaried physician and nursing staff. It focuses on evaluating and diagnosing medical…
Disaster planning is a widely accepted duty of both hospital management and boards of directors. The disasters most leaders have in mind are either a natural event like a tornado or earthquake that strikes a hospital’s service area, or human-made incidents that involve physical harm, such as…
Hospitals and health systems increasingly are entering performance-based contracts as part of the trend toward population health and value-based care. These arrangements typically require organizations to accept greater financial risk for the care they provide by agreeing to deliver defined…