Hospitals might improve their ethics consultation processes if they design and use a brief ethics family assessment tool to determine families' and patients' values, two ethicists say.
Hospital ethics boards seeking a solution for efficiently and effectively documenting and assessing ethics consultation work could find a best practice in the ethics consultation web (ECWeb) program developed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in Washington, DC, experts say.
President Obama's administration reversed its decision to revise a Medicare regulation to include paying physicians to discuss good advance care planning with patients.
Hospital ethics committees could clarify and improve the way they handle issues involving life support in the intensive care unit (ICU) if they brought more nuance to any definition of the word "futile," an expert says.
The Joint Commission can start accrediting psychiatric hospitals, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced in late February 2011.
Increasing data show that variations in care have a negative impact on outcomes and costs some estimates are that almost a third of healthcare dollars are spent in a wasteful manner or go to overuse of the system.
Most people have trouble planning the next week's dinners or their next vacation, let alone something that is two and a half years away.
There are literally dozens of studies that enumerate some of the problems that plague patients as a result of imperfect transitions of care.
On March 14, there was a big celebration at Mercy Memorial Hospital in Monroe, MI, attended by officials from the Michigan Hospital Association.
Your current systems will need to be remediated if they will be used to check medical necessity for ICD-10 standards when they are implemented in October 2013, says Jeffrey Smith, RN, MBA, CPC, a New York City-based manager at Accenture Insight Driven Health, a management and technology consulting company.
