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Saints Medical Center in Lowell, MA, announced recently that it will pay $579,000 to settle alleged Medicare billing violations, the first settlement since the publication of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) voluntary self-referral disclosure protocol (SRDP).
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A mother took her 4-year-old daughter to the emergency department with symptoms of gagging and watery diarrhea. The physician caring for the child determined that the child was not suffering from dehydration and provided a prescription for the child's nausea. The child's symptoms worsened. After the parent was told by the hospital to allow the medicine additional time to work, the child died. A verdict was entered against the hospital in the amount of $200,000.
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Hundreds of obstetrical nurses, midwives, residents, and doctors completing an intensive continuing education program focused on risk management are helping their hospitals lower professional liability costs through an obstetrics-intensive patient safety program.
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In today's healthcare environment, as patients are being discharged from the hospital sicker and quicker than ever before, some patients are in and out of the hospital as if they are going through a revolving door, says Catherine M. Mullahy, RN, BS, CRRN, CCM, president and founder of Mullahy & Associates, a case management training and consulting company based in Huntington, NY.
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The proposed rules for accountable care organizations (ACOs) were released at the end of March, and Donald Berwick, MD, administrator for the Centers For Medicare & Medicaid Services, lost no time writing about their potential import in the New England Journal of Medicine.
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Laura Sellers, director of operations at Skyland Trail, an 80-bed behavioral health hospital in Atlanta, has gone through 10 Joint Commission surveys.
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How many times a day do you hear or read the word "safety"?
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The Joint Commission has announced that it and its Center for Transforming Healthcare will participate in the Partnership for Patients, a public/private initiative designed to make hospitals safer by reducing harm and readmissions.
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Perhaps one of the most startling sentences in a recent Health Affairs article by Joint Commission president Mark Chassin, MD, FACP, MPP, MPH, is one in which he and his co-author, commission executive vice president Jerod Loeb, state that "...we know of no health care organization that has been able to achieve a consistent state of high reliability."
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If anyone knows how difficult it is to measure something as ephemeral as "good communication," it is David Maxfield.
