Representatives from the Medical Group Management Association, the American Medical Association, and America's Health Insurance Plans say three years is not enough time to transition from International Classification of Diseases Version 9 to ICD-10. The Department of Health and Human Services recently issued a proposed rule that would require healthcare providers to adopt ICD-10 code sets for electronic health transactions by October 2011. AHIP and MGMA said their organizations support transitioning to ICD-10 but object to the proposed schedule. They are pushing for a two-year transition to version 5010 of the X12 transaction standards—a few months more than HHS' proposed deadline.
Rochester (NY) General Hospital has installed a silent call-system that combines vibrating pagers, communication badges, and a light-system that eliminates intrusive overhead pages. The system was developed by Special Care Systems LLC, a company that focuses solely on healthcare communications.
I had the good fortune last week to tour Griffin Hospital, in Derby, CT, a winner of this year's Top Leadership Teams in Healthcare. Griffin has good patient outcomes and physician relations for sure, but it attracts patients from well beyond its target region—and gives tours to hospital leadership teams from around the world—because it has embraced the Planetree model of patient-centered care.
At Griffin, leadership decided many years ago that to be able to extend its mission to the community, all employees had to change fundamentally the way the hospital engages patients and delivers care, and that started by understanding at the deepest level what patients and their families want and need from their caregivers.
As I toured the facility, the byproducts of Griffin's transformation were striking. Despite being a 160-bed facility 10 miles outside of New Haven, Griffin doesn't have the atmosphere of a typical acute-care community hospital. It had many hotel-like touches: natural lighting, music in the lobby, private rooms, carpeting throughout the facility, and valet parking. But it also encouraged engagement with patients and their families: 24-hour visiting, open medical records, comfortable family rooms, signs reminding patients to ask doctors questions, and patient rooms that provide a line of sight to the nurses' station.
Even though these amenities improve care for all patients, they are especially important for those seeking care for elective but necessary procedures. These are the patients that choose to travel past other nearby hospitals to enjoy the comforts and care at Griffin. And no doubt that's how Griffin improves its margin. What's more, the collective power of all of these changes creates a strong and lasting message to patients, family, and hospital staff. The patient comes first. This singular focus has over time improved Griffin's organizational culture to the point that the hospital has been named one of Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For—nine years running.
As I walked the halls at Griffin, I was struck by how mature and honest a leadership team must be with itself to embark on this type of organizational evolution. After all, how many hospital CEOs would have been willing to acknowledge that they weren't really putting patients first? That everyone in the organization could do more to better care for patients and their families? That they must change?
The latest news out of the The Joint Commission is that new standards for culturally competent patient-centered care are on the way. I wonder whether similar international standards could be on the way from JCI. For global destination hospitals, the lessons from Griffin should take on even greater significance. New technology and a well-trained medical staff just aren't enough to provide the care that patients expect. Reach out to patients today to find out what they want and then do your best to give it to them.
In early August, Vietnamese patient Nguyen Van Loc informed the Thanh Nien Daily that he had requested Singapore's Mount Elizabeth Hospital to compensate him for the extra fees he paid for the treatment of an intestinal leak that was accidentally caused during treatment for his liver tumor. Since then several Thanh Nien readers have reported having to pay more for treatment at Mount Elizabeth compared to other Singapore hospitals, according to the newspaper. A well-known Vietnamese artist, for example, says a computed tomography scan cost him nearly $850 at Mount Elizabeth Hospital, while the Singapore General Hospital only charges around $359.
Under an agreement, clients of medical travel company Companion Global Healthcare Inc. can add India to their list of possible destinations for obtaining surgery and other medical care. Wockhardt Hospitals in Mumbai and Bangalore have become the first two facilities in India accepted into Companion Global Healthcare's network of overseas hospitals, according to a release. Companion Global Healthcare, which helps self-insured employers and individuals access lower-cost healthcare overseas, now has affiliations with 10 hospitals located in India, Costa Rica, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, and Ireland.
More than a month after announcing that it will offer “accreditation,” the Medical Tourism Association has had a change of heart and changed the term “accreditation” to “certification.” But in this blog post from Avery Comarow, he asks if a trade group can "accredit" organizations that are involved, even if only indirectly, with healthcare.
ParkwayHealth has released several patient testimonials from American's who recently received care in Parkway's Singapore hospitals. "Dollar for dollar, it was really affordable, yet the quality of healthcare there is world-class," reported Nancy Hoskins, RN, who decided to travel to Singapore for knee replacement surgery. "The nursing care was excellent and my orthopedic surgeon made me feel assured and confident, taking time to patiently explain every aspect of the procedure to me."
The rate of improper payments in Medicare's purchases of home medical equipment is significantly higher than the government has estimated, according to a federal audit. The report by Inspector General Daniel R. Levinson at the Department of Health and Human Services found an error rate of almost 29% in a sample of claims paid in 2006 under Medicare's durable medical equipment program. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had estimated a rate of 7.5%. "We attributed these review discrepancies to the . . . contractor's reliance on clinical inference rather than additional medical records available from healthcare providers, CMS's inconsistent policies regarding proof-of-delivery documentation, physicians' lack of understanding of documentation requirements and CMS's lack of procedures for obtaining information on high risk DME [durable medical equipment] items from beneficiaries," Levinson wrote in the report.
Stanford University is expected to announce that it will severely restrict industry financing of doctors' continuing education at its medical school. The move is due to concern about the influence drug companies may have on medical education. Nearly all doctors in the country must take annual refresher courses that drug makers have long paid for, but Stanford will no longer let drug and device companies specify which courses they wish to finance. Instead, companies will be asked to contribute only to a schoolwide pool of money that can be used for any class, even ones that never mention a company's products.
India has earmarked $1 billion for the rollout of a program that allows the country's poor to use a smart card for hospital care. The program also gives insurance companies and hospitals incentives to take part. Many healthcare programs have been introduced in India, but so far none of those programs has taken root throughout the country.The National Health Insurance Program is different, according to the Indian government, because of its use of technology, its business model, and because the information on the smart cards is secure.
