Mercy Health System, which serves southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, has won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Mercy Health was one of the two healthcare systems among the five winners this year, and Mercy representatives say the award is the culmination of a roughly seven-year effort. The results of the effort can be seen in how Mercy Health ranks in benchmarks. The system lowered infection rates from catheters to 0.5%, compared with the best-practice benchmark of 1.6%; lowered mortality rates for pneumonia to 1.2%, significantly below the best-practice benchmark of 4%; and has a total mortality rate of 2.3% that matches the rate of the top 15% of hospitals nationwide.
Hospitals that perform fewer cardiac bypass operations don't have more deaths following the procedure than hospitals that handle more of the procedures, according to a study. Conventional wisdom has assumed that hospitals that do more cardiac bypass operations have better results, with fewer patient deaths. For the study, researchers collected data on 108,087,386 people admitted to U.S. hospitals from 1988 to 2003. The authors say the findings show that using death rates after cardiac bypass surgery may no longer be an accurate gauge of the quality of care.
A voluntary affiliation of 39 hospitals in five San Francisco Bay Area counties has announced that its members reduced the number of two major types of hospital infections dramatically between April 2006 and the end of 2007, saving an estimated 194 lives in the process. During the 21-month period, 34 of the 39 hospitals in the group prevented an estimated 60 percent of the cases of ventilator-associated pneumonia, and an estimated 66 percent of cases of central line-associated bloodstream infections. The 120 lives saved by reducing ventilator-related infections saved an estimated $1.2 million, and the 74 lives saved by reducing central line-related infections saved an estimated $2.7 million, according to the collaborative.
In a statement, representatives from the American Medical Association say a "sneak attack" on specialty hospitals in the farm bill will hurt patients. "Opponents of physician-owned specialty hospitals are trying to slip a provision to ban specialty hospitals into the farm bill conference report, well after the bill has been passed by both the House and Senate," said William G. Plested III, MD, AMA Immediate Past-President, in a statement. "It is bad policy to take away patients' healthcare choices by banning specialty hospitals-especially under the cover of the farm bill," he added.
A startling number of people—especially women—living primarily in the Deep South and in Appalachia saw a drop in life spans beginning in 1983, according to researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health. The study found that found that 4% of the male population and 19% of the female population experienced either declines or stagnation in their life expectancy in the ’80s and ’90s. In addition to race and poverty, other contributing factors include an increase in diabetes, cancers and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, researchers said.
New research shows that in hospitals and other healthcare facilities with MRSA, aggressive screening of healthcare workers should be combined with other measures to help reduce infection rates. The study’s authors looked at data from 169 studies of 33,318 healthcare workers in 37 countries, and found that 4.6 percent of the workers carried MRSA and, of these, 5.1 percent had clinical MRSA infections.