Just before she was about to graduate from nursing school, a career counselor told Lynne Petree to face the facts: She would never be anything more than a school nurse. Months later, Petree, who has 3% hearing, called the counselor from the pediatric intensive care unit where she worked and told her to encourage students, rather than limit them. Petree is now the nurse manager at Heartland Surgical Specialty Hospital in Overland Park, KS.

How are vacant nurse manager positions filled at your hospital? Too often, nurses are promoted to managers because they are excellent clinicians, critical thinkers, and communicators.

A chargemaster checkup can capture lost revenue, but perhaps more important, it can help prevent compliance issues.

St. Elizabeth Healthcare is a five-hospital system in northern Kentucky. Joseph W. Gross, its president and CEO, found that communication was a big problem between primary care physicians in the community and the specialists working on their patients in the hospital. Nurses were often put in the middle, playing telephone tag between the doctors, which caused them to spend time on tasks that didn’t take advantage of their high-dollar skills. So Gross went hunting for a solution.

The cost of diagnosing and treating cancer is soaring, but defining overutilization and calculating ROI can be a challenge.

Many hospitals still offer defined-benefits pension plans, but the trend is toward defined-contribution plans.