Quality & Patient Safety
Trustee Talking Points
Trustee Talking Points
Misuse of prescription opioids is reaching crisis proportions in the United States, with an estimated 44 people dying every day from an overdose of such painkillers.
The problem cuts across demographic and geographic categories, enveloping the…
Trustee Talking Points
Trustee Talking Points
Performance data give Medicare and other payers the ability to measure the value of health services.
Value-based competition will thoroughly disrupt health care markets and will favor innovative players.
Providers will need to reconsider what…
Our Obesity Problem
36.5% of American adults are obese.
Here’s how it breaks down by age.
Trustee Talking Points
Trustee Talking Points
Hospital leaders — executives and trustees — must pay attention to how facilities affect infection control and patient safety.
Medicare and insurers are tying reimbursement to measures on health care-associated…
Policy
Health care organizations live or die based on the quality of the data their leaders use to make strategic, business and clinical decisions.
And that data — from hospital-acquired infection rates and patient satisfaction scores, to Medicare reimbursement levels — come from dozens of disparate…
Trustee Talking Points
Trustee Talking Points
Health care reimbursement is moving away from the fee-for-service model to value-based payment.
The trend is being pushed by Medicare, private insurers and companies that provide coverage plans for their employees.…
Trustee Talking Points
Trustee Talking Points
Cost is driving a rise in ambulatory care and a proliferation of outpatient settings.
Technology enables these facilities to deliver care across multiple settings.
Roughly eight models of ambulatory sites have emerged.
Differences between these…
2015 was the year of the health care security breach. Nearly 100 million electronic health records were compromised, according to a December 2015 IBM Security report, blowing away the number of data breaches that occurred in the computer services and financial sectors.
Infant mortality hits record low
The U.S. mortality rate fell 2.3% in 2014, to a record low 582.1 deaths per 100,000 live births. The drop was led by a 13.5% decline in deaths from respiratory illness.