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
"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