-
In announcing its final rule for the Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) for calendar year 2009, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) reiterated its intention to strengthen the tie between quality of care furnished to people in hospital outpatient departments and the payments hospitals receive for those services.
-
The emergency department at Middle Tennessee Medical Center (MTMC) in Murfreesboro certainly qualifies as busy: It sees nearly 63,000 patients a year and averages more than 170 patients a day. Yet the average time it takes a patient to get to triage from entry into the ED is 14-17 minutes, and its door-to-doc time averages 35-40 minutes.
-
Before developing a protocol that delegates authority for determining patient status to case managers, a multidisciplinary team at Good Samaritan Hospital in Dayton, OH, spent several months researching the process, seeking advice from the Florida Quality Improvement Organization (QIO) and hospitals in Florida that had piloted a case management admission status protocol.
-
"Throughout our health care system, VA patients and staff face difficult and potentially life-altering decisions every day whether it be in clinics, in cubicles, or in council meetings. In the day-to-day business of health care, uncertainty or conflicts about values that is, ethical concerns inevitably arise." IntegratedEthics: Improving Ethics Quality in Health Care (U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs monograph)
-
The Joint Commission has strongly endorsed recently issued compendium infection prevention guidelines, announcing that the condensed, actionable recommendations may become required as accreditation standards by 2010.
-
Patient satisfaction is higher at hospitals that embrace technology, according to the 10th Annual Most Wired Survey and Benchmarking Study of Hospitals & Health Networks magazine, which is published by the American Hospital Association.
-
There's good news and bad news in a new study just released by the Health Research & Educational Trust, an affiliate of the American Hospital Association, and the Boston University Health Policy Institute: Of 470 hospital chief quality officers surveyed, 97% reported that QI activities had a positive effect on patient care outcomes.
-
As final guidance is hammered out on the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act of 2005, interim guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on the criteria for becoming a patient safety organization (PSO) has allowed the The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to officially designate PSOs.
-
For the sake of her study, Rachel Werner, MD, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania school of medicine and researcher with the Philadelphia VA Medical Center, defined safety-net hospitals predominately by the rate of Medicaid patients seen by the facility. But she acknowledges that the term encompasses much more in general, those hospitals that treat primarily uninsured, vulnerable patient populations.
-
In preparation for its unannounced survey with DNV Healthcare, Citizens Medical Center personnel readied their survey preparation box. Last minute documents were pulled when surveyors arrived for the unannounced survey a patient census, the surgery schedule, a list of patients in restraints.
