Palmetto Health Richland in Columbia, SC, will change the way ER patients are handled based upon recommendations from a team of MBA students at the University of South Carolina. The changes will include requiring medical staff to use checklists for procedures. The changes also will include hiring staff to be patient flow coordinators to track patients from start to finish through admission, diagnosis and treatment.
Maui (HI) Memorial Medical Center will receive a total of $130 million from investment banking firm JPMorgan Chase in a new private funding partnership. The money will be used for working capital and pre-development costs of a new heart, brain and vascular tower.
Lawrenceville-based Gwinnett Medical Center has applied to Georgia health planners for approval to begin an open-heart surgery program. According to Georgia law, the hospital must obtain a certificate of need from the Department of Community Health before it can proceed with plans for the center, which would be the only open-heart surgery center in its county.
The financially failing Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta has been dealt a body blow, as Fulton County has voted to cut $24 million from the medical center's 2007 funding level. Grady officials say the reduction could cut into patient services and staffing at a medical center already slashed to the bone and in danger of losing its accreditation.
After state regulators cleared the way for store-based medical clinics, CVS Corp. said it plans to open more than two dozen inside Massachusetts drugstores in 2008. With the ruling in place, other pharmacy chains and retail stores, as well as hospitals and community health centers, could also open limited service clinics. The council did insist on strict patient safety provisions and required that each clinic be individually licensed by state overseers.
The Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles put pediatric patients in danger of harm, including actor Dennis Quaid's newborn twins, by giving them overdoses of the blood thinner heparin, California regulators have ruled. In a 20-page report, the regulators said the "violations caused, or were likely to cause, serious injury or death to the patients who received the wrong medication" and faulted the hospital for its "deficient practices" around administrating the drug.
A federal appeals court has given San Francisco the green light to require employers to help pay for healthcare for uninsured workers and residents. The court also signaled that it is likely to uphold the city's groundbreaking universal coverage law, making it more likely that a proposed state healthcare law will survive any legal challenge.
Most physician-owned specialty hospitals are poorly equipped to handle medical emergencies, according to a report from inspectors at the Department of Health and Human Services. The findings underscore a long-standing concern about the rapid rise in the number of such hospitals. The report found that 55 percent of 109 physician-owned hospitals reviewed had emergency departments--and that the majority of those had only one bed. Fewer than a third of the hospitals had physicians on site at all times, and 34 percent relied on dialing 911 to get emergency medical assistance.
If you've been in healthcare for any length of time, you've no doubt heard the name Ernest Amory Codman. Namesake of The Joint Commission's annual award for performance measurement, the Harvard-trained surgeon may have been the industry's first quality guru.
Frustrated by the lack of attention his fellow surgeons paid to patients after they left the hospital, Codman strongly believed that it was up to physicians to ensure that the work they did for patients was not only high quality, but continued to serve them in the months and years that followed. His "End Results System" encouraged physicians to collect data from their patients for at least a year after treatment. Eventually, the surgeon started his own Boston Hospital--called the End Results Hospital--and published the hospital's quality data in his 1918 book, A Study in Hospital Efficiency: The first five years.
Codman's ideas were strongly resisted by his fellow physicians, and his philosophy eventually ended his career. Colleagues stopped referring their patients to him, and not long after, his membership to the Massachusetts Medical Society was terminated. In the early 1900s, healthcare just wasn't ready for this quality advocate.
Today, not paying attention to quality is the career ending move. CEOs are constantly looking to not only generate revenue and promote financial growth, but also provide quality care to every patient. They're more involved than ever in making sure the patient has a positive experience at their facility. In last year's HealthLeaders Media Annual CEO survey, 53 percent reported their performance bonuses are based at least partially on quality and patient safety.
CEOs aren't the only ones paying attention to quality. HealthGrades, Thompson, U.S. News & World Report and others are keeping quality scores in the public eye and many states are jumping on the bandwagon, requiring the publication of death rates, giving of aspirin to cardiac patients, and other measures. In March, the first scores from the federal government's Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) will be released, and hospitals are bracing for the media's reaction.
Quality is indeed the most talked about topic in healthcare and that's why I'm proud to introduce HealthLeaders Media's new e-newsletter QualityLeaders. Each week, we'll talk about the hot quality topics facing hospitals today: Pay-for-performance, transparency, engaging your medical staff, and breaking down the quality barriers that exist in hospital culture. We'll also talk to hospital executives who are indeed quality leaders and learn how their organizations have achieved excellence.
I look forward to our weekly conversations and I hope you'll e-mail me with ideas and insights to make our "chats" beneficial for all of us.
A highly trained team of insurance experts is sequestered behind locked doors. They are fed and watered twice a day to keep them lean and mean. They are the real power brokers behind what gets paid vs. what gets denied. They determine, through a detailed mathematical equation that would stump Sir Isaac Newton, that due to their specialty, demographics and other physicians in the same ZIP code, your doctor should get paid a certain amount. More than likely it's about one-third of his original bill. Physicians have no control over this system; they either accept what is paid or they are dropped from the insurance plan. Most feel what they have lost on a per-patient basis they can make up for in volume.
