A number of hospitals and healthcare centers are stepping up education and implementing stricter procedures in the fight to combat MRSA, although some believe health facilities aren't doing nearly enough to reduce the risk of the drug-resistant bacteria. Some are now calling for increased staffing and greater resources to meet the demand of public scrutiny over hospital-acquired infections.
Philadelphia-based Drexel University is offering online certification in health informatics and other areas. The online degrees being offered include a BS in Health Services Administration, an Advanced Physician Assistant Studies Program, and a Certificate in Healthcare Informatics.
A team of 700 technologists at Cleveland Clinic are reinventing the hospital experience for healthcare providers and patients as the medical center positions itself as a leader in health-information technology. The medical charts of nearly 5 million patients have been digitized, more than 3 million electronic prescriptions have been filled, and more than 120,000 patients regularly access their full health records online. As a result, the team of doctors, nurses, Web developers and software engineers has improved safety, cut costs, and given patients more control over their care, said Clinic representatives.
MEDHOST, a vendor of emergency department information systems, announced that University of Virginia Health System has chosen its software. The software will be integrated with the Virginia Health’s hospital information system from GE Healthcare.
As the CIO for the rapidly growing storage vendor NetApp, Marina Levinson had to scale the IT organization quickly so that it could handle both current tasks and any other innovation that might be on the horizon. In this interview, Levinson explains how she has organized her team to work closely with the business in order to ensure that IT's investments match the organization's strategic priorities.
The Indianapolis-based outpatient imaging provider Center for Diagnostic Imaging will participate in the Indiana Network for Patient Care. The Network is a health information exchange and a statewide network focused on supporting clinical care with up-to-date, secure, immediately accessible patient information.
For all that is said—and all that we write—about strategy, leadership, and competition, these are the things that haven't mattered all that much for the majority healthcare leaders. Now comes this notion of globalization, and it flies in the face of the old saw that all healthcare is local.
"One of the challenges with globalization is that it creates options," Kaveh Safavi, MD, JD, chief medical officer at Thomson Reuters' Center for Healthcare Improvement, told me in a recent interview. "You have to earn the business, and that's probably the greatest lesson here. The idea that you have a geographic franchise is less and less guaranteed. You really have to earn your business because geography matters less and less."
There are a select few name-brand academic medical centers and major systems that have long competed globally. Let's face it, community hospitals in the U.S. didn't have to fight for their share of the market for many years and until recently didn't have to compete on quality, service, or value.
True healthcare globalization could change everything.
"I think it's going to force providers who were not competitive into achieving a competitive edge because they don't have a lock on a geography," says Safavi.
Of course, all of the above implies a significant number of Americans will travel for healthcare, and I don't yet think we're at the point that many will consider jetting to Thailand as their first, second, or even third option.
But a new research brief by Thompson Reuters says 71.2% of Americans are well-aware of overseas treatment as an option. Any marketer will tell you that awareness is the first step in the process of converting customers, so while this number may not have a tangible value, it has significance.
The brief, which pulled data from Thomson Reuters' 2008 PULSE survey of 23,000 Americans, also noted that the more affluent the respondents were, the more willing they were to use medical travel. Nearly 30% of those interested in using medical travel had an income of $150,000 or more, followed by 25.8% of respondents with an income in the $100,000 to $149,000 range and 23.7% with an income ranging from $75,000 to $90,000.
In a survey like this one there's often a gap between what people self-report and what they actually will do. However, increased awareness and the willingness on the part of the affluent both bode well for global destination hospitals, and they further the trend that U.S. providers cannot overly depend on what Safavi calls their "geographic cartel."
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On July 1, Group Health will open Bellevue (WA) Medical Center, a four-floor, 190,000-square-foot building. The medical center is intended to provide care for more than 1,000 people a day who will come for outpatient treatment. Some will have surgery there, but if Group Health patients need to spend the night, they'll do so at Overlake Hospital Medical Center. The two facilities will be connected by a tunnel.
Psychiatric patients who need hospitalization wait for hours in emergency departments for admission because hospitals are dropping mental health units and beds are scarce, according to a survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians. Nearly 80% of hospitals said mentally ill patients sometimes wait four hours or more to be admitted, and about 10% said patients wait more than a day on average. Average admission times for non-psychiatric patients were shorter, and 84% of the medical directors said ER wait times for all patients would drop if their hospitals had better psychiatric services.
Child health advocates in Georgia hope a federal court decision will stop the state from denying medical services to children who receive Medicaid. The advocates say Georgia has a long history of reducing or denying care ordered by physicians and paid for through Medicaid. The decision by U.S. District Judge Thomas W. Thrash pertains to the case of a 13-year-old developmentally disabled girl. Her doctor prescribed 94 hours of private duty nursing care a week for her, but the state Department of Community Health approved only 84 hours. The judge found the state does not have the discretion to deny funding for services prescribed by a treating physician.
