Quality & Patient Safety
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…
Between 2005 and 2010, disparities in care between white and black patients fell for 13 of the 17 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services inpatient process measures. Disparities between white and Hispanic patients fell for 14 of the measures, according to a report published in the Dec. 14,…
Snapshot As Americans live longer, many endure unnecessary interventional treatments at the end of life, driving up spending while overlooking patients’ desires to die peacefully at home. However, new thinking on mortality and the growing use of hospice and palliative care may make a…
Snapshot With reimbursement at risk from readmissions, hospitals are eager to collaborate with nursing homes to smooth the discharge process and provide staff training. For their part, nursing homes are standardizing protocols and developing long-term care plans to win hospitals’ referrals.
Meritus Medical Center in Hagerstown, Md., has done something every hospital in America wants to do. “We decreased readmissions [from skilled nursing facilities] by 24 percent across the entire county,” says Andrea Horton, director of care management for the community hospital. “…
More than half of health executives expect to recoup their investments in population health management within four years, according to a survey report from KPMG. Other respondents weren’t quite as optimistic: 29 percent expect their investments in health information technology and data and…
Hospitals are making progress in reducing health care-associated infections, but additional work is still needed, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Central line-associated bloodstream infections declined by 46 percent between 2008 and 2013. During the same…
While we were finishing up this issue of the magazine, Jonathan Perlin, M.D., the chair of the American Hospital Association’s board of trustees, and president of clinical services and chief medical officer of HCA, visited our Chicago office for the annual meet-the-chair event. It’s an…
Payers in population health contracts are using claims data to identify the physician responsible for a patient’s health and spending. It’s an inexact science that can aggravate providers before empowering them.
Snapshot By engaging patients with new services and technology, hospitals are heading off costly interventions and building loyalty. As Lisa Michaelis discusses various life coaching and wellness services offered by Mosaic Life Care, it might be easy to forget that she works for a hospital system.