February

New Push Sticks Hospitals with Cost of Errors

It's a new way to push for patient safety: Don't pay hospitals when they commit certain errors. Beginning Oct. 1, Medicare no longer will pay those extra-care costs for eight preventable hospital errors, including catheter-caused urinary tract infections, injuries from falls, and leaving objects in the body after surgery. Nor can hospitals bill the injured patient for those extra costs.

AP

Senate Takes Stock of Poor Healthcare IT Progress

President Bush may have called for electronic health records by 2014, but where's the strategy for accomplishing it? That's what the General Accounting Office asked the Senate Budget Committee at a hearing to examine the administration's progress on healthcare IT advancement. Valerie Melvin, director of the Human Capital and Management Information Systems Issues at GAO gave a disheartening report. "Even though [the Department of Health and Human Services] HHS is undertaking these various activities, it has not yet developed a national strategy that defines plans, milestones, and performance measures for reaching the President's goal," she said.

Diana Manos, HealthcareIT News

Healthcare Reform Must Include IT Issues, Group Says

The U.S. Congress needs to pass healthcare IT legislation before private companies develop multiple systems that don't talk to each other, according to members of the Health IT Now Coalition and the Information Technology Industry Council. The groups urged Congress to move ahead with health IT legislation such as the Promoting Health Information Technology Act, which would establish a public/private group to recommend health IT standards and certification and would budget $163 million a year for healthcare providers to adopt health IT products.

Grant Gross, IDG News Service

Hospitals in Permanent Decline?

Compared to 20 years ago, hospitals face enormous business headwinds. The development and popularity of alternative sites of care, periodic reimbursement cuts, hospitals' seeming inability to collect from delinquent patients. the list of business challenges to hospitals goes on and on.

Philip Betbeze, HealthLeaders Media

ERs Fail as the Nation's Safety Net

The long waits that government inspectors say endanger emergency room patients at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center can also be found in backlogged hospitals across the country, according to the American College of Emergency Physicians. The group surveyed 1,000 emergency care physicians and found that one in five knew of a patient who had died because of having to wait too long for care.

Mary Engel and Rong-Gong Lin II, Los Angeles Times

County Emergency Rooms Using New Systems to Trim Wait Time

Watsonville Community Hospital and Dominican Hospital, the two hospitals with emergency rooms, have adopted new procedures to speed up emergency care and reduce the times patients are taken elsewhere even as the number of visits has increased.

Jondi Gumz, Santa Cruz Sentinel

Performance Improvement, Part Three

It has been said that in the average ER seeing 20-30,000 patients annually, you can just let things happen and, provided adequate staffing, the patient flow will remain adequate. But patient flow is analogous to fluid dynamics, wherein the resistance to flow increases exponentially with flow rates: as an ER scales up, the friction increases disproportionately to the point that process break down and stop, unless they have been carefully engineered.

Movin' Meat blog

New York City Hospitals Reinvent Role of Emergency

New York City hospitals of all sizes and types are spending hundreds of millions of dollars renovating, rebuilding and expanding their emergency rooms. The hospitals are often dividing them into treatment areas for the sickest patients with the most dire injuries and using quieter corners for the patients using ERs for routine medical care. An increasing number are also taking steps to bring civility and hospitality to the emergency room because they are seen as vital points of entry for paying patients whose eventual admission accounts for needed revenue.

Sarah Kershaw, New York Times

Influencer: The Power to Create Sustainable Results by Changing Behaviors

Contributor David Maxfield provides some keys to the power of influence and outlines why healthcare influencers like IHI founder Don Berwick are so successful If influence is the capacity to help ourselves and others change our behavior, then it is clearly one of the most vital and most unavailable capacities in the world. We all want influence but few know how to get it.

David Maxfield, for HealthLeaders Media

Candidates' Views on Health IT

Here's a nice summary of the positions held by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain on the role of IT in reducing healthcare costs. All three recognize the potential. However, "the candidates' plans are still a far cry from the idealized national network that the healthcare IT community has imagined and, of course, there is no guarantee that if any one were elected they would be able to deliver on their proposals. The focus on universal insurance could also overshadow healthcare technology," notes Computer Business Review.

CBR