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The Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC) has announced an accreditation program that is tailored to the specific needs of practices that offer office-based surgery (OBS), and it is priced to be cost-effective for smaller practices. AAAHC defines an OBS center as an organization that has no more than four physicians/dentists and no more than two operating/procedure rooms.
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Whether it's the smartphones, tablet computers, or e-readers, new technology is all the rage these days. At the Shriners Hospitals for Children in Erie, PA, this mobile technology is being used to help patients.
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In what is getting to be a familiar, tragic refrain, the improper use of single-dose vials (SDVs) has resulted in pain clinic patients in Arizona and Delaware acquiring serious bacterial infections that were "completely preventable," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports.
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The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) has created a new measure now endorsed by the National Quality Forum (NQF) that will require health plans for the first time to report all readmissions that occur within 30 days of discharge something that happens to about a fifth of Medicare patients.
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For years, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) state operations manual has had guidelines for surveyors to assess issues related to patient safety at hospitals.
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Everyone knows that in order to have the kind of hospital that gets an A grade in safety from The Leapfrog Group, you need to have an organization whose culture values safety. But how do you know that you do? And is there a way you can measure it?
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As the National Committee for Quality Assurance hopes that all-cause readmission rate reporting by health plans will assist in creating more consideration of patient care across the continuum, the National Quality Forum (NQF) hopes a new measurement framework for multiple chronic conditions will likewise help improve care in and out of the hospital.
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In a first-of-its-kind survey, The Leapfrog Group graded more than 2,600 hospitals of all sizes and types in the United States on how they performed in more than two dozen weighted patient safety measures both process and outcomes.
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Several legal cases decided in recent months have rendered material discoverable that doctors thought was protected. These cases in places as varied as New York, New England, and Illinois have caused some physicians to question whether they should participate in peer review processes if their comments and discussions can end up being used against them in civil litigation.