Finding New Revenue for Profitable Growth
Why is finding new revenue for profitable growth so difficult in
healthcare? When selecting revenue innovations, decision-makers
need to know how much revenue they can add, how long it will take,
and how much internal resources are required. When resources are
limited, like IT or staffing, one must know how much time and
effort will be required to implement the innovation.
Bill Phillips and Terry Schmidt, HealthLeaders News
Many Errors by Medical Residents Caused by Teamwork
Breakdowns, Lack of Supervision
Residents, interns and trainees are more likely to make medical
errors when there is a lack of communication between a team of
caregivers and when a more experienced supervisor isn't there,
according to a new study funded by the Agency for Healthcare
Research and Quality. Errors stemming from handoff problems were
due to a variety of communication breakdowns, researchers found. In
34 percent of the cases where a handoff error occurred, an
incomplete or inaccurate transfer of information took place.
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
report
The Key to Improving Patient Throughput
Healthcare needs a transformation - hospitals can no longer
afford to take a business-as-usual approach. Substantial dollars
are at stake, whether it's absorbing the cost of poor efficiency or
foregoing revenue opportunities because of poor capacity
management.
Marybeth Regan, PhD, for HealthLeaders News
Patient Flow Recommendations and
Predictions
Comments relating to the "2007 National Survey on Patient
Throughput and Capacity Challenges." The best way to minimize
critical care and telemetry as patient flow bottlenecks is through
variable acuity units, where patients receive the most appropriate
level of care in the lowest cost setting. You will never be able to
match the number of critical care and telemetry beds to the exact
number of patients who need them. You can waste money building too
many of these high acuity beds - and don't forget that about 15% of
the patients in your critical care and tele beds right now don't
meet admit criteria and should be in other units. Or you can
continue to go on ambulance diversion. A patient flow system like
StatCom's can be a useful tool in implementing variable acuity
care.
Tim Gee, Medical Connectivity Consulting
2007 National Survey on Patient Throughput and Capacity
Challenges - What Do the Results Mean to You?
Industry speakers discuss the significance of the results of the
2007 National Survey on Patient Throughput and Capacity Challenges.
Nearly three-fifths surveyed said their facilities did not have the
ability to track patients continuously and over half rated the
efficiency of their facilities' bed-turn process as poor or fair.
The majority said they have incorporated process improvements, but
half said they have not incorporated a patient flow system despite
ranking patient flow systems as having the greatest potential to
improve patient throughput.
Free copy of survey results available to
registrants.
An industry webcast sponsored by StatCom
Wait for Hospital Bed a Life or Death
Matter?
The American College of Emergency Physicians' poll revealed
about 200 emergency-room doctors know patients die while waiting in
ER hallways for inpatient beds to become available. Fifty percent
of those polled also indicated the practice of "boarding" patients
in ER hallways harmed patients, and many physicians expressed
concern about the impact of the practice on care quality. ACEP
President Dr. Linda Lawrence adds the critics are wrong to believe
overcrowding in ER hallways is related to the numbers of uninsured
patients in the nation; she reports both uninsured and insured
patients are left in hallways because many hospitals do not have
enough inpatient beds.
Carol M. Ostrom, Seattle Times
Cost Not as Big a Barrier to Electronic Records, Survey
Shows
Finances continue to be the largest barrier to electronic
medical records adoption, but the barrier may be easing, according
to a new survey. Further, survey results suggest clinician
resistance also is falling. Forty percent of respondents to the
Medical Record Institute's Ninth Annual Survey of Electronic
Medical Records Trends and Usage cited lack of adequate funding or
resources as the largest barrier to adoption, down from 56% a year
earlier.
Health Data Management
Hospital's ER Diverging into Two Tracks
Jackson Hospital is starting its new "Fast Track" program, a
kind of clinic where certain ER patients will be routed during the
busiest hours. It will be a way to build better patient-flow, and
patients can be seen quicker in Fast Track than if they had stayed
in the ER.
Anne Spencer, Floridian
Uncoordinated Care: A Survey of Physician and Patient
Experience
Patients rely on their primary care doctor to be their principal
point of contact for their health care needs. But how effectively
are physicians overseeing their patient's care? The California
HealthCare Foundation asked Harris Interactive to survey a
representative group of California's 36,000 primary care doctors to
determine how well they coordinate their patient's care across
other providers and sites, and how efficiently they communicate
with patients about test results or other aspects of their
care.
Harris Interactive
Denver Health Expands RFID
InnerWireless announced that Denver Health has expanded its RFID
tracking throughout the 1.5 million-square-foot, 477-bed hospital
in support of an initiative from hospital administrators to
identify and reduce waste. InnerWireless deployed Vision, a
real-time location system formerly known as PanGo, in response to
the hospital's need for real-time asset tracking that would
integrate with its Cisco wireless network.
HealthLeadersIT
Google Says Its Health Platform is Due in Early
2008
Google has announced that it will launch its Google Health
initiative in early 2008. Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San
Francisco, Mayer outlined the ways in which the search giant plans
to bring its immense data storage and organization capacities to
the field of medical care and patient records. Google is already
the starting point for a large majority of the health-related
searches on the Web, she pointed out.
Richard Martin, Information Week
Privacy Concerns Cast Pall over Microsoft's Medical Site
Debut
The Chicago Tribune weighs in on the software giant's recent
foray in personal health records. There are now several of these
initiatives underway, some promoted by software vendors, others by
employers. To me, the "personal health record" is a good idea, no
doubt. But in my book, it is putting the cart before the horse in
physician and hospital connectivity.
Jessica Mintz, Chicago Tribune
IHI Managing Hospital Operations, Jan 23-25,
2008
From bottlenecks to backlog, hospitals everywhere face the same
business challenges. These problems exhaust resources, hinder
improvement, and compromise customer satisfaction. But unlike other
industries such as transportation, banking, and food services, many
health care leaders have failed to capitalize on one powerful,
fundamental notion: smarter management is not costly
management.
Institute for Healthcare
Improvement
IHI Designing Reliable Delivery of Optimal Care, Feb
5-6, 2008
This seminar is designed for anyone involved in inpatient and
acute care processes, as well as care planning and delivery. It
allows participants to apply reliability science to one key set of
processes with the expectation that measurable improvement in the
chosen area will lead to wider application of reliability practices
across the entire organization.
Institute for Healthcare
Improvement
Big Deal in the RF Location Tracking World
I haven't spent much time recently on the location tracking
tools that I think will be a big part of hospital efficiency
improvement in the future. The folks I met this weekend at LA
County are thinking about them for next year when they move to a
huge new emergency room, but the big fuss at HIMSS in 2006 around
the asset and people location tracking has yet to really pan out.
Ekahau, announced a big sale to big public hospital system
Carolinas HealthCare System.
The Healthcare Blog
If Disney Ran Your Hospital
This is not a recent news item, but I came across this book from
a review on the hospitalimpact.org blog and thought it was worth
sharing. Who can resist a business topic book with such a title -
If Disney Ran Your Hospital.
So I started reading more on this blog - good stuff. If you
haven't been to it, check it out.
hospitalimpact.org
Who Are You Going To Trust?
As Microsoft uses its new HealthVault Web site to try to unravel
the mess of medical records, they also have to earn people's trust.
The company's new Web site, HealthVault, aims to be a central
repository for consumers to store their personal health data so
that they can share it more easily with doctors and other medical
professionals. The idea has become a sort of medical care holy
grail: Current recordkeeping is a mishmash of files. But can
Microsoft solve this?
Robert Langreth, Forbes
For These Startups Patients are a Virtue
Health care startups are modeling themselves after YouTube and
social networking sites such as MySpace in an effort to connect
patients with each other and help them navigate overwhelming
amounts of medical information available online. Americans have
searched for medical information online since the Web's early days,
but the numbers are growing. Now 160 million U.S. adults have at
one time or another searched for health information online, up from
136 million in 2006. Larger players such as Yahoo have hosted
online patient communities, as have health information sites like
WebMD. But this Web 2.0 generation of social networking and
specialized search engines offers patients tools - user-generated
video, blogs, online collaborations called wikis - familiar to
users of Facebook and podcasting crowds.
Victoria Colliver, San Francisco Chronicle