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There has been an intense focus on reducing unplanned readmissions in hospitals. Payers are refusing to pay for them, and increasingly the public believes that they are a determinant of the level of quality of care a particular facility provides to patients. But a study in the June issue of Health Affairs1 indicates that looking at this single data point doesn't tell the whole quality story.
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Talk about surgical safety and people will automatically think of issues like objects left in a patient after closing or operating on the wrong site. Surgical-site infections are a hot topic. But surgical scheduling? Put that in the PubMed search engine and not much comes up. Add the term "patient safety" and you get a single, lonely article.
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Every parent of a toddler knows that a time-out isn't so much a punishment for the child as a moment to breathe for the parent. It's this moment of calm that is the basis for the use of time-outs in a variety of fields, including surgical medicine. It's a chance to stop and make sure the path you are on is correct. And it's a tool that anyone can use, says Vicki Hess, RN, MS, principle at Catalyst Consulting, based in Baltimore, MD.
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Wrong-site surgery: 20 times a week. Wrong surgery on a patient: 20 times a week. Object left in a patient: nearly 40 times a week. Surgical "never events": more than 4,000 times a year. Those statistics were reported in a study published in April in the journal Surgery.1 With such statistics, there will never be a single solution that makes surgery safer.
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No one expects everyone to read through the 1,000-plus pages of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) proposals for 2014. But there are parts of the proposal that impact quality departments, and they demand some study.
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Open enrollment for coverage under the new healthcare marketplaces is set to open in about three month, and opponents of the law are raising new concerns with the plans.
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What information do you need that you are not getting today, in order to be successful in your job?
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In March, the National Association of Healthcare Access Management (NAHAM) reported that the draft Health Insurance Marketplace application ran 15 pages for a family of three, with some versions going as many as 21 pages.
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Making or rescheduling appointments, accepting outstanding balances, or discussing scheduling were once tasks that could be handled by patient access employees only during business hours, but this situation has changed at University of Pittsburgh (PA) Medical Center.
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Inaccurate demographic information at registration occurs for many reasons, but is the mistake fixed before the claim goes out the door? Or is it discovered months later, when the claim has been denied and the patient has received a bill?
