Hospital Peer Review
RSSArticles
-
PA Home Visits Sharply Reduce Hospital Readmissions After Heart Surgery
A recent study concluded that just two home visits by a physician assistant during the week after hospital discharge significantly reduces the chance a heart surgery patient will be readmitted. The reduced readmissions also reduce overall costs associated with the heart surgery — a $39 savings for each dollar spent on PAs.
-
Case Study 2: LWBS Rates Drop
Bay Area Hospital in Coos Bay, OR, had an ED struggling to keep up with demand for years. The ED had so many patients that its left without being seen statistics were about 8%, well over the industry average of 2%. The ED overcame this problem with the strategic use of physician assistants and nurse practitioners. -
Physician Assistants Help Drive Quality Improvement
More hospitals are finding that the strategic use of physician assistants can improve quality and patient satisfaction without adding a financial burden. These physician extenders can reduce readmissions and improve ED efficiency, recent advocates say.
-
AHA Continues Fight Against OIG Reviews
The American Hospital Association is continuing its campaign against the ongoing hospital compliance reviews conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, which it says are not conducted fairly.
-
TJC Launches New SAFER Scoring Matrix
The Joint Commission is launching a new matrix for identifying deficiencies cited during surveys, hoping the new format will help hospitals prioritize and focus corrective actions.
-
TJC Allows Docs to Text Orders
In a move that was welcomed by many healthcare professionals, there's wariness in the ranks.
-
Precise Coding Is Best Defense with Quality Measures
A lot is riding on quality measures that have been proven invalid, but more accurate measures are not coming any time soon.
-
Self-Reported Data May Be Inaccurate
In addition to the vexing problem of quality measures that unfairly downgrade a hospital’s quality and safety scores, common quality measures also can boost a hospital’s scores higher than they deserve, says David Friend, MD, MBA, chief transformation officer and managing director of the Center for Healthcare Excellence & Innovation with BDO USA, a consulting company based in Chicago.
-
Study Finds Only 1 in 21 Quality Measures Valid
<>New research from the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality in Baltimore suggests that most of the measures used by government agencies and public rankings to rate the safety of hospitals are not accurate or reliable. -
Usefulness of Quality Measures Questioned, May Be Misleading
Quality can be hard to define in any arena, and in medicine there can be so many variables that pinning down which hospital is better than another becomes a herculean task. That is one reason hospitals have been bombarded with a slew of quality measures and metrics that promise to distill all those variables into hard numbers and rankings that can be used to assess a hospital’s quality and patient safety.