hospitals
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How Hospitals, Nursing Homes Keep Lethal ‘Superbug’ Outbreaks Secret
The outbreak started in January 2014. That’s when a resident of the Casa Maria nursing home here was diagnosed with Clostridium difficile, a highly contagious and potentially deadly “superbug” that plagues hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare facilities. By the end of February, six more Casa Maria residents were suffering from the infection, characterized by fever, abdominal cramps and violent diarrhea...
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How Much Does An Emergency Room Visit Cost?
A man crashes his bike and gets taken to the emergency room. The bill is more than $20,000 for the visit, which lasts a bit over 2 hours. He was taken to the highest level adult trauma center near the site of the crash in the Austin, Texas, area — University Medical Center Brackenridge, which is operated by the Seton Healthcare Family. So how much does an emergency-room visit cost? Read More »
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Ignoring Social Media Trends May Be Harmful For Hospitals
A new report from Hewlett-Packard Social Media Solutions claims hospitals put both their patients and reputations at risk by ignoring social media. Read More »
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Improving Quality Patient Outcomes A Money Loser For Hospitals
Surgical patients who have complications generate better margins for hospitals, a new study in the Journal of American Medical Association has found. Cue the outrage from the consumer media about “profit-hungry hospitals.” Read More »
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In Disasters Such as Hurricanes, HIE Is 'As Critical as Having Roads, as Having Fire Hydrants'
The Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY) sees itself as a "public utility" as much as an HIE. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, as patients bounce between hospitals (and as other public utilities, such as electricity and transportation, are compromised), it has enabled critical continuity of care. The images of dozens of red-flashing ambulances, evacuating as many as 200 patients – some of them in critical condition, some of them infants – from NYU Langone Medical Center, whose backup generator had failed, to hospitals such as Sloan-Kettering and NewYork-Presbyterian, will be some of the most enduring images from the super storm. The harrowing process was made much smoother by the fact that those patients' electronic health records were secure and readily accessible at the hospitals to which they were thanks to New York's statewide HIE... Read More »
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In Hurricane’s Wake, Decisions Not To Evacuate Hospitals Raise Questions
Now, in the late evening hours, the worst-case scenario was unfolding at the main campus of NYU's Langone Medical Center in Manhattan, which had lost much of its backup power at the height of the storm. Could North Shore-LIJ dispatch ambulances from its Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City to pick up four critically ill babies from the neo-natal intensive care unit? New York City hospital and nursing home patients and their loved ones might reasonably have believed they were safe as Hurricane Sandy approached. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had exempted hospitals and nursing homes in low-lying "Zone A" areas of the city from his pre-storm evacuation order. Much thought and planning had gone into the decision to "shelter in place."
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Independent Doctors Unite To Fight National Trend Toward Hospitals Buying Physician Groups
Since January, at least 114 local doctors have traded their independence for steady paychecks from hospitals. The move, part of a nationwide trend, has wide implications not only for doctors but also for patients' pocketbooks. Read More »
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Indian Hospitals Could Show U.S. Hospitals How To Save Money Without Cutting Quality
No matter how the fight over Obamacare shakes out, the biggest challenge facing U.S. health care will remain reducing costs while improving quality of care and access for patients. The experience of a few innovative Indian hospitals may point the way forward. Read More »
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IT Iconoclasts: Experts Offer Dissent On Policy Issues, Technology Implementation
Each month, more hospitals and office-based physicians buy and use electronic medical records and other health information technologies as the U.S. presses on toward achieving the goal first articulated by President George W. Bush in 2004: providing most Americans with access to an electronic medical record within a decade... Read More »
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Johns Hopkins: Thanks To EHRs, Time With Patients Seems “Squeezed Out” Of Medical Training, Investigator Says
Question: Who would have thought it? That there is yet another potentially deadly unintended consequence of bad health IT and health IT hyper-enthusiasm? Read More »
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Joint Commission Warns About Dangers From Alarm Fatigue
The nation's largest hospital accreditation organization has issued a warning to hospitals about the dangers of alarm fatigue, which can occur when clinicians become desensitized to the incessant beeping of medical device alarms. Read More »
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Keeping Everyone in the Know: New CMS ADT Rule
On March 9, 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued the Interoperability and Patient Access Final Rule aimed at enhancing interoperability and increasing patient access to health information. This Final Rule contains a new Condition of Participation (CoP) that requires all hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, and Critical Access Hospitals to electronically share (via an electronic health record [EHR] or another electronic administrative system) event notifications (also referred as e-notifications) with other providers across the continuum of care. These event notifications should occur whenever patients have an emergency department (ED) or inpatient admission, discharges, or transfers (also known as ADTs) in community hospitals.
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Latest ECRI Institute Report Names Top 10 Hospital Technology Issues
The Emergency Care Research Institute (ECRI) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing applied scientific research to enable improvement of patient care. The organization is a designated Evidence-Based Practice Center by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and listed as a federal Patient Safety Organization by HHS... Read More »
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Lawmaker Slams VA For 'Big Brother' Surveillance
The chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee has filed legislation requiring Department of Veterans Affairs' hospital personnel to have the consent of a patient or other authorized party before setting up surveillance cameras in the veteran’s room. Read More »
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Let's do the numbers
Julie Creswell and Reed Abelson offer a story in the New York Times about the HCA for-profit hospital system, noting "A giant hospital chain is blazing a profit trail." The HCA story and similar ones about other hospital chains financed by private equity force us to consider how a such firms can achieve a return on equity that satisfies investors. Read More »
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