Quality and Safety

The HIPAA Privacy and Security Omnibus final rule – issued by HHS on Jan. 17 – should bring some long-awaited clarification and certainty to marketing, fundraising and other aspects of safeguarding and using health information.

Your organization likely will experience a data breach of some kind. And when it does, people will want to know, what you were doing to prevent one, and how you are going to respond.

A new home care model being adopted in a handful of states is proving that home care saves dollars and helps families care for their loved ones.

Last April, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued criminal background check guidance that has caused consternation among some senior living facility owners. What are the issues and how should companies handle the new guidance?

Intermountain Heart Institute at Intermountain Medical Center announced last week they have developed a tool designed to eliminate 30-day hospital readmissions for heart failure patients and improve the quality of medical care a patient receives in the hospital.

During the Thursday morning keynote at HIMSS13, the national coordinator for health IT, Farzad Mostashari, MD focused on the nation's broken healthcare system, while delving into a range of topics.

While many companies across the country are seeing positive results and cost savings through their workplace wellness programs, a new study from Health Affairs suggests that the savings employers may strive for with these programs may more likely come from cost shifting to the most vulnerable employees rather than employees' improved health.

The charts said it all -- high levels of quality improvement coupled with significant savings as Hawai'i Pacific Health changed the way it provided care and started tracking gains on both the clinical side and the financial side.

Women in a number of counties located primarily in the South and West have higher mortality rates than those in other regions, and the reasons extend beyond access to medical care, according to research published in the March issue of Health Affairs.

A new series of data briefs prepared by Avalere Health and released by the SCAN Foundation show that seniors enrolled in traditional Medicare who suffer from severe mental illness (SMI) and substance abuse disorder (SUD) cost the program an average of five times more than those without SMI in 2010.