Quality and Safety

Iowa- and Illinois-based Genesis Health Systems has joined forces with visibility and analytics provider, STANLEY Healthcare, and nurse call platform provider, Critical Alert, to streamline clinical workflows using STANLEY'S RTLS platform and Critical Alert's Nurse Call tool, the companies announced last week.

Over the past decade, the federal government has publicized 115 different ways to measure medical quality in hospitals, from assessing wait times in emergency rooms and noise levels outside hospital rooms to tracking blood clots in surgical patients.

Decisio Health, a startup that aims to help acute-care provider organizations continually improve their clinical processes, launched the Decisio Health Clinical Intelligence Platform Tuesday and also announced $4.5M in Series A funding.

Proponents of virtual care say it is the wave of the future. But while the healthcare industry might not find much disagreement with the practice in theory, it is in the potential limitations that skeptics might find flaws.

The CERT Division of Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute has released its list of 10 technologies emerging in the next five years with the greatest vulnerabilities in terms of cybersecurity, finance, personal health and safety.

Valita Fredland most recently served as chief privacy officer and counsel at IU Health. In her new post, Fredland will serve as vice president, general counsel and privacy officer.

UC Health – the flagship University of Cincinnati Medical Center, as well as 167 of its affiliated practices – has reached the Stage 7 on the HIMSS Analytics EMR Adoption Model.

Veterans are still waiting to see a doctor.

Early returns from the Health Care Innovation Awards, a CMS initiative that tests new payment and service delivery models, already "show a wide range of experiences that have resulted in tangible benefits for patients" and have helped the agency develop better policies, said CMS Chief Medical Officer Patrick Conway, MD.

Implementation of MACRA will impact not only physicians, but also the hospitals with whom they partner, the American Hospital Association told Andy Slavitt, acting administrator of CMS, and the U.