Quality and Safety
Healthcare organizations that were previously sitting along the sidelines when it came to healthcare reform are going to have to get the ball rolling now that the Supreme Court has made the ruling to uphold the 2010 healthcare law, according to a report published Friday by the PwC Health Research Institute (HRI).
The National Quality Forum voted to uphold its decision to endorse an all-cause hospital-wide readmissions measure, which had been challenged by seven hospitals.
Government Health IT Editor Tom Sullivan spoke with Bill Bernstein, chairman of the healthcare division at law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, which works with states and providers on health IT and related public policy issues, on the implication of the Supreme Court's ACA ruling and how it affects how the law will ultimately play out, health IT projects, and the impact it could have on Republican presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, who has been stumping on ACA repeal.
In 2010, Scott Hawig, chief operating officer at Duke University Health System, and Jim Bohnsack, executive vice president of product development at Transunion Healthcare, decided to analyze the behavior, demographic and financial makeup of one hospital system's patient population against service lines to determine how to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs at the same time.
The Alaska Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) -- the state's Medicaid agency -- has agreed to pay $1.7 million to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to settle possible violations of the HIPAA Security Rule, making it the second largest settlement for HIPAA violations to date.
Over the last seven months, St. Joseph Health System (SJHS), a large healthcare organization located in California and western Texas, has been using a multi-disciplinary approach to engage its physicians and clinicians in understanding the impact of clinical practice patterns and resource variability.
The future of the nation's largest health insurance program -- Medicaid -- hangs in the balance of the Supreme Court's decision on the 2010 health law.
In central Pennsylvania, Capital BlueCross and PinnacleHealth recently announced an accountable care arrangement (ACA), that officials with both organizations say is similar in design to the Medicare-based accountable care organizations (ACOs) being promoted by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
A growing number of hospitals around the U.S. have adopted policies that ban discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) patients according to a report released Tuesday by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.
The healthcare provider community must make changes to the delivery of care in order to meet the challenges currently facing the industry and the nation. That will be the central message Brent James, MD, chief quality officer and executive director of the Institute for Health Care Delivery Research at Intermountain Healthcare delivers during his speech "Clinical Transformation and Increasing Value," at the Healthcare Financial Management Association's ANI conference in Las Vegas at 2:45 p.m. on Monday, June 25.