Looking to prevent a significant labor and cost burden on America's hospitals, CEOs from 17 hospitals and health systems sent a letter to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services this week, strongly objecting to some of the required date reporting included in the 2009 proposed Inpatient Prospective Payment System rule. The 17 CEOs represent more than 100 hospitals—all members of the Premier healthcare alliance.
Some of the measures that hospitals would be required to report under the 2009 IPPS rule are those collected by the Society for Thoracic Surgeons' database, says Charles Hart, MD, CEO of Regional Health in Rapid City, SD, and chair of Premier's Quality Improvement Committee. STS is a private, proprietary database that hospitals must pay to participate in. Many hospitals already collect this data, Hart says, but for those who don't, being required to do so will mean a significant cost increase and need for additional personnel.
"There's certainly routine agreement in the medical field that it's an excellent database," Hart says, but he and the 16 other CEOs who signed the letter fear that the STS database is the first of many that CMS could require hospitals to participate in. While the CEOs are in favor of more transparency and data reporting, Hart says, they asked CMS to come up with a way to automate reporting requirements and lessen the burden on healthcare organizations.
"We'd much rather spend our time looking at the data to see how we can improve instead of spending our time collecting this information," Hart says.
Premier also sent a separate letter to the National Quality Forum (NQF) opposing the use of any quality measures that depend on proprietary methodologies or tools as contrary to the public interest and evidence-based quality improvement.
"Private-sector innovation can contribute valuable methodologies that enhance quality measures, and that innovation should be encouraged," says Blair Childs, Premier healthcare alliance senior vice president of public affairs. "However, measures subject to public reporting, and those used as a basis of reimbursement, must be fully transparent to providers and the general public. Monopolistic suppliers of quality measures that are required in public programs are unacceptable."
New Ulm, MN, will participate in an experiment on whether it's possible to eliminate heart attacks throughout an entire community.
The experiment is one of two Allina Hospitals and Clinics plans to announce in a five-year, $100 million health initiative it has named the Center for Healthcare Innovation. The other experiment is aimed at discovering if Allina can affect the health of those who live in the Minneapolis neighborhoods where Allina is based. Both New Ulm and the south Minneapolis neighborhoods will become living laboratories on how to prevent disease and do a better job of treating it when it does occur, said Allina officials.
Patients with advanced cancer often don't know how long they have to live or how chemotherapy will affect their lives, according to a study. In many cases doctors don't give patients such information, and other times patients misunderstand their doctors and perhaps hear what they want to hear, the study found. As a result, patients may ask for aggressive, painful therapies that have no hope of helping them.
As criminals capitalize on the growing use of the Internet by consumers searching for inexpensive drugs, counterfeit medicines are on the rise worldwide. Seizures of bogus prescription medicines jumped 24% in 2007, and illicit versions of 403 different prescription drugs were confiscated in 99 countries, according to the Pharmaceutical Security Institute.
Hospitals that receive high marks for coronary-bypass outcomes still may not be doing all they can to avoid preventable deaths from the procedure, according to a study. Researchers reviewed 347 deaths from coronary-bypass surgery at nine Ontario hospitals and found that 32% of them likely resulted from lapses in established procedures and other preventable shortcomings. The findings indicate that relying solely on hospital report cards misses a critical opportunity to improve quality of care.
William Bobbitt Paschall's death at Louisburg, NC-based Franklin Regional Medical Center led to three federal investigations at Franklin Regional. Beyond Paschall's case, investigators found that the hospital violated dozens of federal standards designed to keep patients safe. Nurses and doctors failed to record critical medical information, and the hospital allowed nurse anesthetists to work without required supervision, according to two federal investigations. The third investigation has found problems with the hospital's pharmaceutical and respiratory services, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in Atlanta.