A year ago, Parkland Memorial Hospital had a 15 percent vacancy rate, causing it to rack up millions of dollars in unbudgeted overtime and temporary staffing costs. Nurse staffing levels were especially low, which was not a good thing, because state and federal inspections had determined a severe nursing shortage was one of the major factors causing inferior patient care. Since that time, Parkland has turned things around on the hiring front with assistance from a company called Supplemental Health Care, which hospital administrators hired to help them add staff fast. I spoke with Janet Elkin, president and CEO of Supplemental Health Care, about the process.
Despite all the hoopla about clinical and business intelligence (C&BI) applications, the use of these tools by hospitals and healthcare systems is still in an early phase, a new report indicates. Only 46% of the 529 respondents to a HIMSS Analytics survey said they were using C&BI, and the majority of those indicated they were still learning how to use these analytic tools. Also revealing was the fact that more than half of C&BI users said they were using the analytic modules imbedded in their electronic health record/hospital information system (EHR/HIS). In contrast, less than a quarter of the C&BI users had purchased "best of breed" solutions, which tend to be more robust than those in EHR/HIS products.
DeVry, which has two for-profit medical schools in the Caribbean, is accepting hundreds of students who were rejected by U.S. medical colleges. These students amass more debt than their U.S. counterparts -- a median of $253,072 in June 2012 at AUC versus $170,000 for 2012 graduates of U.S. medical schools. And that gap is even greater because the U.S. figure, compiled by the Association of American Medical Colleges, includes student debt incurred for undergraduate or other degrees, while the DeVry number is only federal medical school loans.
In 1999, an Institute of Medicine study found that as many as 98,000 people die every year as the result of medical error in the U.S., incurring some $17 billion to $29 billion in hospital expenses. In 2009, the Safe Patient Project concluded that the situation may have gotten even worse in the decade that followed. That's a tragedy, which Dr. Andy Wright — a surgeon and one of the core faculty members at the Institute for Simulation and Interprofessional Studies (ISIS), a health-care education program based at the University of Washington — thinks can be helped by playing videogames.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Paying doctors in small practices bonuses for the quality of care they provide leads to a modest increase in the number of patients who get the recommended treatment for their conditions, according to a new study. Researchers found that doctors who received bonuses had more patients receiving recommended medications, having their blood pressure under control and being given tools to help them stop smoking, compared to doctors not receiving bonuses. "Payment structures can help people focus on preventive care elements in a setting where patients are sick and there are a lot things going on," Dr. Naomi Bardach, the study's lead author from University of California, San Francisco, told Reuters Health.
The sweeping federal health care law making its major public debut next month was meant for people like Juanita Stonebraker, 63, from Oakland, Md., who retired from her job in a hospital billing office a year and a half ago. She was able to continue her health insurance coverage from the hospital for a time, but when she tried to find an individual policy on her own, none of the insurers she contacted would cover her because she was diabetic. "I didn't even get to tell them about the heart attack," said Ms. Stonebraker, who has been without health insurance since July.