Quality & Patient Safety
Reducing readmissions is an important way to improve quality and lower health care spending, and hospitals are making significant progress. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services reported that the national readmission rate (i.e., instances when patients return to the same or different…
Organizational leadership’s commitment to ensuring the safe use of health information technology is one of several actions proposed in a Joint Commission Sentinel Event Alert recently released to reduce patient harm caused by HIT-related events. After analyzing 3,375 sentinel events that…
U.S. health care access and quality are improving as demonstrated by a decrease in the rate of uninsured adults seen in the first half of 2014, according to a report recently released by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. However, the 2014 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities…
Boards have a keen interest in quality, and they are helping their hospitals and systems to implement a variety of improvement strategies. One particularly effective tactic is building successful partnerships with patients and families by including patient and family advisers. A new guide from the…
In a market flooded with new technologies and apps that aim to make physicians’ jobs easier and patients more engaged with their health care, there is still a need for human interaction, according to speakers at the recent Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society 2015 Annual Conference…
Snapshot Trustee's partnership with ECRI Institute continues with this overview of three breakthroughs in clinical technology that have the potential to improve, lengthen and save lives.
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.