Quality & Patient Safety
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 …
Record Number of Transplants
33,606: Number of organ transplants performed in the U.S. in 2016
8.5%: Increase over 2015
19.8%: Increase since 2012
Source: United Network for Organ Sharing, January 2017
For a long time, behavioral health patients have been marginalized in the nation’s health care system. This has been due in part to lack of insurance coverage and the low priority placed on caring for these patients. Closure of many inpatient psychiatric units, reduction in…