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When the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced it would publicly report hospitals' readmission and mortality rates for heart failure, heart attack, and pneumonia, Baylor University Medical Center (BUMC) was front and center.
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As part of its journey to prevent health care-associated infections, Florida Hospital's clinical excellence team asked staff what risks they saw. The answers they got were sometimes unexpected, but they helped the team understand the organization's culture and determine which fundamentals should be saved and which should be altered.
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It might feel like you're speaking a different language when you try to get physicians on board for your quality initiatives. And you actually are, according to one lawyer and health care consultant well versed on the topic.
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"What [Goal 7] is doing is... reminding us that more Americans are dying of these infections than breast cancer, motor vehicle incidents, and HIV infection combined in this country," says Stephen Weber, MD, associate professor in the section of infectious diseases and chief health care epidemiologist at the University of Chicago Medical Center and consultant with Joint Commission Resources.
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Hearing "The Joint Commission is here" doesn't have to send staff into shock. And it shouldn't mean last-minute scrambling to get ready.
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Recent literature highlighting the high number of hospital readmissions has brought the issue front and center. Coordinated care, an integral indicator of quality, means managing patients, especially those at high risk for rehospitalization, in the hospital and beyond.
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It's going to hurt at first. Financially, from both the cost side and the revenue side. The investment is huge. And it's a lot of work a lot of starts and stops, says Gray Ellrodt, MD.
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In the 2010 OPPS proposed rule, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) raises a number of issues, offers clarification, and makes some proposals regarding physician supervision issues. One such issue discussed in the proposed rule has to do with what "immediately available" means.
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If there's anything to be learned from the Recovery Audit Contractors (RAC) demonstration project, it's that your hospital could take a significant financial hit.
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"Nobody really looks at the operating room when they're talking about ED overcrowding. But that elective schedule is what drives the peaks and valleys on the inpatient side," says Susan Madden, MS, Press Ganey's VP for analytics.