Leaders at NCH Healthcare System are attacking root causes and aggressively managing risk.
This article appears in the January/February 2016 issue of HealthLeaders magazine.
Allen Weiss, MD, MBA, FACP, FACR, president and CEO of NCH Healthcare System, Inc., in Naples, Florida, was seeking ways to ultimately save money—not just among sick patients, but for NCH's patient population in general.
"We got to the root causes of the chronically ill by asking why: 'Why is this obese person having chronic diabetes and heart attack?' The obvious answer is they should not have been eating the wrong foods and should have been exercising more," he points out. "All of us know what we should do, but we don't employ healthy behaviors enough."
So, Weiss tried an experiment to promote healthy behaviors among a targeted group to see if it actually improved health while lowering costs. He looked no farther than outside his office—to his own workforce.
Boston's world-renowned Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Lifespan have signed a letter of intent to form a partnership that aims to improve cancer treatment, research and teaching, the two institutions announced on Thursday. The partnership will particularly benefit Lifespan patients with "rare and complex cancers," according to a joint statement, while providing all Lifespan patients access to "a broader array of clinical trials, and to emerging and novel cancer therapies." "It's a good day for Rhode Island," Dr. Timothy Babineau, Lifespan president and CEO, said in an interview. The partnership with Dana-Farber, he said, is exclusive to Lifespan. It is not a merger.
Hospitals have switched from handwritten prescriptions and pills in Dixie cups to computerized order entry and robotic drug dispensing, but one thing hasn't changed over the past two decades: the small but severe risk of injuries and deaths from medication errors. In a new report, Minnesota hospitals disclosed four deaths and 10 serious injuries related to medication errors in the 12-month period ending last Oct. 6. That's the highest total in 12 years of "adverse event" reporting in Minnesota, which remains one of only five states to publicly disclose hospital errors as part of a concerted effort to prevent them.
A revised and more specific clinical definition of sepsis will be released at the Society of Critical Care Medicine's 45th Annual Congress, beginning here on Saturday.
To reduce infections patients acquire inside its hospitals, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital conducted surveys of housekeeping staff and embedded researchers with them as they cleaned. Researchers discovered barriers to better cleaning often stemmed not from disregard for the patient but from respect. "Some of our housekeepers are reluctant to get right up in a patient's space," said David Calfee, the hospital's deputy medical director for infection prevention and control. "They worry they'll get in the way or the smell would be offensive to the patient." The project is one way New York hospitals have sought to fight hospital-acquired infections. [Subscription Required]
"The hospital with a serious heart problem," read the title of the story that aired on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees" last June, via reporting by senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen. The target was St. Mary's Medical Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., a 464-bed facility with about 2,400 employees. The subject matter was explosive — children who'd died or suffered after undergoing cardiac surgery at the hospital. "We calculate that from 2011 to 2013, the death rate for open heart surgery on children at St. Mary's Medical Center was more than three times higher than the national average," noted Cohen in her report.