Quality & Patient Safety
Keeping patients safe is a prerequisite for delivering high-quality health care. In response to the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 report To Err is Human, the health care field has dramatically increased efforts to address adverse safety events. Those efforts could be accelerated…
Hospital radiologists and pathologists are on the receiving end of orders for scans and tests. But they can’t do their work alone.
With that in mind, they are building relationships with ordering physicians and working with them to ensure that patients get the right tests at the right…
Value-based payment approaches, including Medicare’s Quality Payment Program for physicians and other eligible clinicians, tie fees and bonuses to how well providers perform on various quality and cost measures. An underlying assumption of value-based payment is that quality of care can be…
Faced with ongoing improvement work and beckoning opportunities, more than 4,000 hospitals around the country have joined together to improve care and increase collaboration through the Hospital Improvement Innovation Network.
HIIN was launched in September 2016 by the Centers for Medicare &…
Violence
Report examines cost of community violence
Community violence cost U.S. hospitals and health systems an estimated $2.7 billion in 2016, according to a report prepared for the American Hospital Association by Milliman.
Patient safety
Trustee talking points
In the aftermath of a number of shootings nationwide, hospitals are re-evaluating how well-prepared they are for handling mass casualty events.
The American Hospital Association has launched a yearlong initiative, Hospitals Against Violence, to help the…
Trustee talking points
Patient safety is essential for hospitals and health systems, and it should be a strategic priority.
Boards need to be informed about and engaged in their organization's safety efforts.
There are any number of ways for trustees to improve their oversight of safety; a…
Hospice care has been shown to improve patients’ quality of life while reducing costs near death, but hospice services are chronically underused.
OhioHealth, however, has used a quality improvement approach to address that conundrum — and with good success. Within less than a year…
Physician engagement in value-based care is an increasingly critical issue for health care boards. Many organizations are focusing on financial incentives to encourage physicians to move the needle toward value, but remuneration is a blunt tool and only one among many that can influence …