Quality and Safety
When people are "moved into a medical environment from their home, it's very disorienting," says Joshua Jacobs, vice president of Windsor Healthcare, a Norwood, N.J.-based recovery, rehabilitation and nursing facility. "When they're taken out of their routine, it's very easy to lose focus."
In the past, surgery simulation was a crude approximation of what doctors really encounter – and they needed to be close to a teaching hospital to even try it. But surgery simulation is finally coming of age, thanks to breakthroughs in mobility, cloud-based software, and 3D imagery.
This past April, the federal government announced the names of 27 healthcare organizations nationwide that will be part of a brand new Medicare Shared Savings Program. If the doctors and other providers in one of the newly selected accountable care organizations (ACOs) are able to lower costs and improve care, they will reap financial rewards. Yet if you ask any of those involved, the money is not what excites them. It’s the opportunity to deliver better healthcare.
Catholic Health Initiatives is partnering with Orion Health to build an enterprise-wide HIE that will enable physicians and clinicians to access patient records across its 100 facilities in 19 states. Once connected, CHI plans to link to statewide HIEs in states where its 76 hospitals are located.
The Joint Commission has found that communication breakdown is the overwhelming root cause of sentinel events. Terry Edwards, CEO of PerfectServe, an intelligent clinical communications platform, is trying to do something about it.
3M Health Information Systems opened access Wednesday to its Healthcare Data Dictionary, under an agreement with the Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs. 3M President Jon Lindekugel explains how this will enable semantic interoperability for the joint DoD/VA integrated electronic health record (iEHR), and discusses other innovations the project could lead to.
Allscripts had a great fall. CEO Glen Tullman says he and his team will put the EHR company together again -- better and stronger. He talks about what went wrong, the difficulties of integration, plans for recovery and Allscripts' future in the market.
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) on Wednesday submitted comments on ICD-10 proposed rulemaking to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. CHIME urged HHS to remain committed to ICD-10, while calling the one-year delay an appropriate "middle ground" for all stakeholders.
Hospitals, physician practices and health plans across the country are boosting care -- and saving millions -- by employing quality measures, information technology and plenty of innovation. A new book tells the stories behind the successes.
Chesapeake Regional Medical Center has rolled out a five-foot, automated disinfection robot named Tru-D (Total Room Ultraviolet Disinfection), part of a $2 million CDC grant awarded to Duke University for the prevention of healthcare-associated infections.