Quality and Safety
Quality measurement in healthcare has always been difficult and expensive. In fact, most of today's measures do not create enough value for actual healthcare users and, as a result, have little impact on improving care and lowering costs.
As patient outcomes become increasingly linked to reimbursement, hospital quality and finance teams must coordinate better than ever before. Deborah Larkin-Carney, vice president of quality at Barnabas Health, shares how quality and finance connect at her health system.
In a region brimming with high-ranked hospitals but still suffering from poor care coordination, four health systems are initiating a new joint venture to find efficiencies and lure payer partners.
There's a lot of buzz in the healthcare community about the right path to choose for accreditation and deemed status with CMS. For many years, The Joint Commission has been the number one choice, but Det Norske Veritas, a newcomer in 2008, is gaining significant ground.
Hospitals may have less control over readmissions than clinicians, administrators or federal regulators would like to believe, new research suggests, meaning that the readmissions penalties imposed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services may be inappropriate.
Engagement is a big buzzword in healthcare these days. Every program seeks to achieve it; every provider wants to enhance it. But what is engagement exactly?
Most hospital administrators choose to implement vendor management systems to keep track of who is in the facility, what they are doing in the facility and to make sure the vendors have the training the organization wants them to have, but today's vendor management technologies allow for expanded uses.
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is a highly regarded teaching hospital in Boston, but in 2012, the hospital found out it had one of the highest rates of readmissions among Medicare patients in the country. That meant federal fines of more than $1 million -- and a lot of soul searching for the staff.
Last week, Consumer Reports released new safety scores for 2,591 U.S. hospitals. The magazine is just one of a number of organizations that rates hospitals on safety. Should hospitals care about all these rankings?
Avoiding readmissions penalties has an obvious and direct impact on a healthcare organization's revenue. In an effort to improve patient care and keep your organization's revenue healthy, effective communication is essential.