UPMC faces having to review contracts for up to 700 of its doctors after Highmark terminated them from its network effective Jan. 1. How many contracts will have to be tweaked as the result of Highmark's Nov. 20 decision is unknown, but health lawyer Michael Cassidy, said the impact would be "significant." "It's going to be a significant issue," said Cassidy, who chairs the health law practice group at the downtown offices of Tucker Arensberg. "Some doctors will have protection, some won't." At issue is patient volume and other productivity standards that are baked into every doctor's contract when they work for a health system.
Since I began working at the Puget Sound Business Journal about two months ago, I've noticed nearly every other week there's a new hospital affiliation — or partnership, or agreement, or some term indicating two organizations are joining forces — announced by a major health care company in the area. Just since I've been here, Monroe Valley General Hospital has become a part of EvergreenHealth, Group Health has moved some of its services to Swedish Medical Center and Yakima Valley Hospital joined Virginia Mason's network. In recent years, some of the biggest news in the hospital world was Swedish's new affiliation with Providence Health & Services.
In the fast-moving world of health IT, there can be too much of a good thing. So argues John Mattison, chief medical information officer (CMIO) at Kaiser Permanente. Speaking recently at a health-tech conference, Mattison touted the potential for big data to improve patient outcomes and population health, while at the same time warning that without proper governance models, interoperability standards and developer platforms, the flood of medical information being collected and stored could become unmanageable. "We have a lot of people who are traditional data scientists," Mattison says, who are "freaked out about big data."
If hospitals are to survive going forward, they need to change with the times, Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton CEO Richard Freeman told business leaders on Tuesday. Before a meeting of the MidJersey Chamber of Commerce, Freeman — who replaced Anthony "Skip" Cimino earlier this year — said the hospital was "preparing for the future" by studying patient trends and demographics in order to ensure appropriate services are available. It's a practice Freeman recommended to all business owners, not just those in the healthcare field.
Tennessee-based Community Health Systems (CHS) disclosed in its Form 8-K SEC filing in August that its computer network had been hacked at least twice in April and June of 2014 through criminal cyber attacks originating from China. All healthcare organizations can learn from one health system's breach. CHS -- which owns, operates, and leases 206 hospitals across 29 different states -- confirmed that these hacking incidents resulted in the theft of non-medical, patient-identifying information of 4.5 million individuals who had, in the last five years, been referred to or received services from physicians affiliated with CHS.
The design principles in typical healthcare environments inadvertently make patients and staff more stressed, Osborn says. "Ceilings are low, the lights are glaring, the floors are noisy, the privacy is non-existent," he says. "It all accumulates to push us towards hyperarousal? it's not soothing at all." For a building to be therapeutic, it should have spaces that flex to allow both sociability and privacy. Social spaces with comfortable, movable furniture encourage people to speak to other patients. Places that encourage family and friends to visit, like single-bed rooms or private areas which can be screened off, increase visiting, reduce patient stress and speed up recovery.