Quality and Safety
Hospitals participating in Independence Blue Cross' accountable care contracts are reducing costs, improving care and earning incentives, according to the Philadelphia-based insurer.
Patient advocate and researcher Jessie Gruman died July 14 at the age of 60, after living with cancer for the better part of her life and turning her struggle into frameworks for progress. In 1992, Gruman helped launch and lead the Center for Advancing Health to help improve the healthcare system after two decades navigating modern medicine herself.
It's a chilling reality -- one often overlooked in annual mortality statistics: Preventable medical errors persist as the No. 3 killer in the U.S. -- third only to heart disease and cancer -- claiming the lives of some 400,000 people each year. At a Congressional hearing July 17, patient safety officials put their best ideas forward on how to solve the crisis, with IT often at the center of discussions.
Geisinger Health System announced a new initiative this week that will offer patients access to advanced cancer treatment protocols and clinical trials. By partnering with Hamburg, Germany-based Indivumed, the health system has set its sights on the "next generation" of oncology, according to President and CEO Glenn D. Steele, Jr., MD.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not routinely get involved in telling hospitals how to run operations, but with increasing reports of EHR deployment problems, the Atlanta-based operation now sees the need to act.
The computerized physician order entry market will grow at 6.5 percent over five years, from $938.4 million in 2013 to more than $1.2 billion in 2018, according to a new report from research firm MicroMarket Monitor.
There are many dimensions to the Accountable Care Organization challenge, including the logistics of changing a well-established acute care model, the process of configuring the network, analyzing IT capabilities across the spectrum and determining how all those moving parts will work together.
Who's to blame when EHR implementations go south? There's often enough fault to go around. But when the fallout is bad enough, sometimes self-interested parties are all too ready to point fingers.
The use of smart pump technology has been proven to reduce the frequency of errors in the administration of intravenous drugs. But software glitches and other potentially dangerous problems persist.
One medical practice is in much better position for Stage 2 meaningful use, as an ongoing project that relays data from implantable cardiac devices directly into personal health records continues to show encouraging early returns.