Quality and Safety
Becoming a behavioral health home is a real opportunity but comes with some challenges. A webinar offered by SAMHSA/HRSA outlined some operational considerations for behavioral health agencies thinking about making the transformation.
If hospitals launching health plans strikes some as a sign of traditional health insurance's coming extinction, the business model so many American hospitals were built upon -- fee-for-service -- is declining too. Integrated healthcare and shared savings contracts between payers and providers are going to become the norm.
In a recent report released by the Leapfrog Group and published in Health Affairs, researchers found that there hasn't been a lot of progress over the years when it comes to hospitals meeting certain safety standards.
On Tuesday, Maine Gov. Paul LePage announced at a press conference a plan to repay Maine hospitals the $186 million owed to them by the state for patients covered by Medicaid.
In a report released last week, the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System describes a set of three healthcare policies that could slow health spending by $2 trillion over 10 years by focusing on the way public and private purchasers pay for healthcare, enhancing consumers' choices of higher-value care and streamlining administrative procedures.
Many IT managers focus mainly on external data security, but this is not the only area where attention is needed. Protecting systems from internal vulnerabilities is also critical to minimizing security risks and the costly penalties that often result from them.
On Jan. 1 2013, 106 new accountable care organizations began participating in the Medicare shared savings program, as federal health officials try to show that new health reform programs powered in part by better IT are starting to reap financial benefits.
While only 17 percent of the working age U.S. population, adults with disabilities account for disproportionately high (almost 40 percent) emergency department visits, according to a recent study from National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers.
A new healthcare commission announced last week will focus on developing state-level policies aimed at reducing the cost of care while improving quality.
The National Quality Forum (NQF) has endorsed 14 infectious disease quality measures designed to help providers evaluate patients, manage treatments and improve patient care.