Quality and Safety

The U.S. Senate voted in Sylvia Matthews Burwell as the new Secretary of Health and Human Services on Thursday afternoon. Burwell, the former head of the Office of Management and Budget, was confirmed 78-17. Before and after the vote, Burwell both faced her share of fire and garnered high praise.

Does your organization have a comprehensive data governance program? If not, you're not alone. But you're also not close to where you should be if you want to provide better care at lower cost, according to a new report.

At Health Datapalooza this week, exactly how information gets analyzed is up for new ways to be disrupted, revamped and rethought. The theme: endless possibilities. In fact, the ways that the gathering of the appropriate data and the analysis of it can improve health outcomes is astounding. But first the right data must to be collected.

A system-wide EHR rollout is no walk in the park. With poor management and implementation plans, it can sap worker morale and deter long-term success. This appears to be what has transpired this week at the Athens Regional Health System in Georgia after staff unanimously voted "no confidence" for the system's CEO, who has effectively announced his resignation.

Smaller electronic medical record companies are giving bigger firms a run for their money as the market continues to grow, according to a recent report from Kalorama Information.

National Nurses United, which bills itself as the largest organization of nurses in the country, is in the midst of a campaign to spotlight the potential risks of patient harm spurred by what the group calls, "an unchecked proliferation of unproven medical technology and sharp erosion of care standards."

A Stanford University engineering group has come up with a way to manipulate deep body implants -- such as pacemakers, nerve stimulators and brain stem devices -- wirelessly.

Over the past few decades the physical diagnosis skills that were once the cornerstone of doctoring have withered, supplanted by a dizzying array of sophisticated, expensive tests, according to medical educators.

In this age of big data, analytics in healthcare has expanded from business intelligence and revenue-cycle management to clinical care.

There is ample evidence that barcode technology for medication has had a significant impact on patient safety. But while most U.S. hospitals have adopted barcode medication administration, experts say there's big room for improvement.