April 2008
Here's one for Earth Day.
New Green Ratings in the Offing for Health Care Facilities
The LEED for Healthcare system will incorporate health care-specific issues such as "increased sensitivity to chemicals and pollutants, traveling distances from parking facilities, and access to natural spaces," according to the Web site for the Green Building Council. It can be used at inpatient, outpatient and long-term-care facilities as well as medical office buildings, assisted living facilities and medical education centers.
Jaimy Lee, San Diego Business Journal
Forget the Silver Bullets, Just Take Better Aim
Healthcare has become addicted to the silver bullet. We're always looking for the quick fix, while ignoring the fact that silver bullets usually misfire. Yet the search for one-size-fits-all solutions goes on. Take the hospital overcrowding crisis gripping North America and much of the world. It's a complex "industrial workflow" problem, with thousands of interacting processes, much like manufacturing. Still, while hospitals jump to adopt new clinical and diagnostic technologies, they're among the last industries to install information technology, including the flow measurement systems which can measure performance improvement.
Anthony Sanzo, CEO TeleTracking Technologies, Inc., HealthcareIT News
Boomers to Flood Medical Care System
Millions of baby boomers are about to enter a health care system for seniors that not only isn't ready for them, but may even discourage them from getting quality care. "We face an impending crisis as the growing number of older patients, who are living longer with more complex health needs, increasingly outpaces the number of health care providers with the knowledge and skills to care for them capably," said John W. Rowe, professor of health policy and management at Columbia University.
msn.com
Medical Errors Costing U.S. Billions
The latest Patient Safety in American Hospitals Study shows that from 2004 through 2006, patient safety errors resulted in 238,337 potentially preventable deaths of Medicare patients and cost the Medicare program $8.8 billion. The analysis found that patients treated at top-performing hospitals were, on average, 43 percent less likely to experience one or more medical errors than patients at the poorest-performing hospitals.
HealthDay/Washington Post
Emergency Rooms Buckle under Patient Load
Overcrowded hospital emergency rooms are at the breaking point across the country, with potentially deadly consequences for heart attack victims and other extremely critical patients, doctors warn. The logjam is the result of a variety of factors, from the number of patients who seek care for non-emergency conditions, to budget cuts, to nursing shortages, to the closing of failing hospitals.
msn.com
Efficiency is the Cure
Appleton (WI) Medical Center's general medicine unit treats patients with such conditions as heart failure, pneumonia and infections, but is also part of a sweeping attempt to change the way the center cares for patients. The changes include redefining the roles of doctors, nurses and other caregivers. Appleton's parent system, ThedaCare, has been testing and refining the "Collaborative Care" model in the redesigned general medicine unit since February 2007.
Guy Boulton, Journal Sentinel
'Going Digital' Going Slowly
"Health care is at least a generation behind the rest of society in terms of technology," says David Merritt, director of the Center for Health Transformation, a think tank based in Washington. "Doctors and hospitals don't use the technology we take for granted everywhere else." The reasons for this lag are many: a colossal, inertia-filled health care system, a paucity of good software, no incentives to adopt new technology and a lack of government leadership. There is also concern, which advocates of digitization say is overstated, about the security and privacy of records containing the most intimate of personal details.
David Kohn, Baltimore Sun
What Nurses Want
The health care industry's continued reliance on paper astounds Lillee Gelinas, vice president and chief nursing officer at VHA Inc., an alliance of hospitals and non-acute-care facilities. Gelinas was making rounds at a major hospital recently when she came upon a familiar sight: a nurse struggling with a huge pile of paper files. A work shift had just ended, and Gelinas assumed the nurse was catching up on the day's charts. Instead, the nurse told her she had come in on her day off to manually gather data for review by the hospital's quality committee, which was meeting the following day. "We have a nursing shortage going on," Gelinas said. "Is that the best use of people's time?"
John Pulley, Government Health IT
National Health Data Network to Include Google, Microsoft PHRs
Federal officials plan to integrate the Nationwide Health Information Network with personal health record databases launched by Google and Microsoft, according to Charles Friedman, COO of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT. ONC plans to expand the NHIN this year to include electronic health record networks operated by the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Indian Health Service and multi-community integrated health care systems.
Bob Brewin, Governmentexecutive.com
Selling the Bitter EMR Pill
Only a few years ago, many chief technology officers, vendors, hospital administrators and others thought that as technology became more pervasive, physicians would have no choice but to adapt. It turned out that assumption was false. For major IT projects to be successful, physicians need to be on board, early and often. The solution, many found, was engaging doctors in leadership roles before implementation.
Pamela Lewis Dolan, AMNews
Open Health Tools Initiative Targets 2009 for Major Release
After two years of planning, a new open source collaborative site called Open Health Tools (OHT) is available to users, and will eventually offer a wide range of free tools and software for expediting EHR implementation and facilitating interoperability, says Skip McGaughy, OHT's executive director. The goal is to have many of the tools up and running by early 2009 according to McGaughy.
Maureen McKinney, Digital Healthcare & Productivity
Collaborative Bidding
In a previous post, "Collaborative Error: The Day I Nearly Quit," I wrote that the old paradigm of physicians and nurses taking care of clinical dimensions of care and administrators keeping finance and operations to themselves does not work any more. The decision not to reimburse for never events, such as wrong-site surgery, falls, hospital-acquired infections, and bed-sores acquired during a hospital stay requires a collaborative effort among clinical, administrative, and board team members. So does improving patient flow, as discussed in "Collaborative Flow."
Dr. Kenneth Cohn, healthcarecollaboration.com blog
A View from the C-SideHospital management focused articles
"World's Best Boss"? Says Who?
Like parents, leaders change, evolve, and grow over time -- as do the people they're leading. Parents will tell you they're still learning and adjusting their parenting style 10, 20, 30 years in. Parents don't parent a 30-year-old the same way they parent a 3-year-old. How do you lead over time? How do you ensure that you're still giving your staff the leadership they need? A few weeks ago I wrote about George Masi, executive vice president and COO of Harris County Hospital District in Houston. Masi outlined the attributes of a good leader. A few of his rules are worth reading even if you think you're an able leader.
Molly Rowe, HealthLeaders Media
Failure to Prepare for the Boomers is Risky
The oldest of the 80+ million "baby boomers" (more than 25 percent of the entire U.S. population) turn 65 years old and become Medicare eligible in 2011. Medicare enrollment will reach nearly 80 million, or about 22 percent of the U.S. population, by 2030. That's nearly double the enrollment in 2006. What actions will be required to sustain the Medicare program? Raise taxes, reduce benefits, prolong eligibility, increase contributions, change behavior, reduce the cost of care, or all of the above?
Edward M. Hindin, for HealthLeaders Media
Take a Number: NPI Deadline Approaches
The health care providers that breathed a sigh of relief when government pushed the deadline for the National Provider Identifier (NPI) back 12 months may be itching with anxiety now that the May 23 go-live day sits around the corner. By now, they should have new 10-digit identifiers prepared for their electronic transactions, but there is no guarantee that everything will go smoothly right away. The purpose of the NPI, created under HIPAA regulations and distributed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), is to replace the old system of provider identification numbers (PINs) used by health plans to distinguish clients. The aim was to simplify the identification process for electronic transactions, but the journey toward reaching that goal has been anything but simple.
Jim Boyle, ADVANCE for Health Information Executive
Stage 6 Hospitals: The Journey and the Accomplishments
HIMSS Analytics created the Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model (EMRAM) to provide a methodology for evaluating the progress and impact of electronic medical record (EMR) systems for acute care delivery environments.1 The introduction of the EMRAM by whitepaper in 2005 and the subsequent research update in 2006 has led HIMSS Analytics to extend the EMRAM research to correlations with quality of care.2,3 Continuing research will evaluate the impact of the EMRAM on financial components of acute care delivery environments.
Michael Davis, Executive Vice President of HIMSS Analytics, Future Healthcare
StatCom is a HIMSS Analytics client and a HMSS platinum sponsor.