Quality & Patient Safety
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.
This year’s winner of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in the health care category, Charleston (W.Va.) Area Medical Center Health System is the largest nongovernmental employer in its region, and is an important regional…
Last year marked the 50th anniversary of Medicare and Medicaid. These two programs (including state funding) represent 37 cents of every dollar spent on health care in the United States. There are more than 54 million Medicare beneficiaries and 64 million Americans on Medicaid.
As one of the…
Trustee Talking Points
Trustee Talking Points
Sepsis is a leading cause of death and the most expensive condition treated in hospitals.
Nearly half of patients who die in the hospital have sepsis.
Many hospitals have given sepsis control less attention than other types of patient harm.…