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Like many outpatient surgery programs, Mount Nittany Surgical Center in State College, PA, has a limited budget and always is trying to stretch its educational dollars as far as possible.
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Have you ever tracked how you spend your time? While boring, it can be useful information to have. I thought that it would be interesting to see what some of my operating room associates do with their time. We set up a task sheet to track this information.
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After my security officer is designated and familiar with the HIPAA security rule, what are my next steps toward compliance? What steps are necessary for a proper risk analysis, according to HIPAA? Is a risk analysis and review of security rule compliance a one-time activity?
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With many outpatient surgery programs having few, if any, funds available for public relations, there is a strong need for free or low-cost ways to improve your community image. Many programs are finding out that by giving back to their community, they also can reach potential patients and improve staff morale in the process.
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The obesity rate has risen dramatically, from 13% of men and 17% of women in 1980 to 28% of men and 34% of women in 1999-2000. Increasingly, outpatient surgery providers are faced with the question: Can we handle these people as outpatients?
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The Lance Armstrong Foundation, which funds programs that assist people living with cancer, has become known for its bright yellow elastic LIVESTRONG wristbands. But the Morton Plant Mease Health Care hospitals in Florida recently voiced concerns that the LIVESTRONG bracelet on a patients arm could be confused with the yellow plastic bracelets the hospitals use to indicate a patient has opted for do-not-resuscitate status.
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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) consensus panel on end-of-life care convened in December 2004, and among the conclusions reached by the panel of experts on death and palliative care is that medicine knows too little about the process of dying.
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A decision by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to expand Medicare coverage of costly implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) will increase the number of Medicare beneficiaries eligible for an ICD by one-third, to nearly 500,000, and will require beneficiaries to release details about their cases to a database shared by hospitals.
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Questions surrounding resuscitation and other heroic measures, surrogacy, and withdrawal of futile care are complicated enough, but they can be even more complex when the patient is unidentified.
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Companies offering full-body computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans frequently make unsubstantiated claims about what the scans can do, but rarely give information about the limitations and risks of the tests.
