Quality and Safety

Enron, one of the most infamous companies of this millennium because of its corporate ethical scandals, serves a very useful purpose for all businesses. The lessons learned from its mistakes have helped identify new boundaries and standards for what should be expected of all companies. It also brought the value of ethics and integrity into proper focus.

It’s difficult for healthcare organizations to make informed decisions when the data they receive from state agencies is incomplete or slow to arrive.

While most states' efforts to overhaul Medicaid have focused on bolstering managed care as a way to hold a lid on costs, in Oregon a radical redesign of its Medicaid program aims to foster cooperation between providers and create a broader whole-person care model for the roughly 500,000 who receive care under the state's low-income insurance plan.

With a changing medical model that is moving from treating the sick to helping people stay fit, wellness centers have become a component of the real estate strategies for some health systems, hospital executives told an audience of healthcare real estate professionals at THE Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) International's Medical Office Building conference in Atlanta in early May.

At the recent HIMSS Virtual Conference and Expo, David Kendrick, MD, CEO of MyHealth Access Network, a Beacon Community, spoke on his experiences not just implementing a community HIE, but also streamlining costs and improving quality of care in the state of Oklahoma.

By 2020, sales of new vaccines that do not currently exist on the market may hit $24.8 billion, predicted market research firm Kalorama Information in a recent report.

According to a new study published in the June issue of Health Affairs, half of adults over the age of 65 visited the emergency department at least once in their last month of life. In addition, three-quarters of those ED visits led to hospital admissions and more than two-thirds of those visitors died during their stay.

While payers across the country have launched a host of different forms of payment initiatives like ACOs and patient-centered medical homes, designed around some form of risk sharing, Washington-based Premera Blue Cross has found success via its unique payment model it calls Global Outcomes Contracting.

Data breaches are costly and can do great damage to a healthcare organization's reputation. Here are 10 of the largest data breaches in 2012... so far.

One of the government's goals is to align its priorities with the private sector, including the development of accountable care organizations, said Marilyn Tavenner, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, in a keynote address Thursday at the Third National ACO Summit in Washington, D.C.