Quality and Safety
A UCLA-led consortium of five University of California medical schools and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has received a $9.9 million grant from HHS's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to investigate the use of wireless and telephone care management to reduce hospital readmissions for heart failure patients.
The nation's healthcare IT chief, David Blumenthal, MD, acknowledged that achieving meaningful use of health IT would be hard work, and then told his audience of more than 600 health system and hospital CIOs and IT managers there would be even harder work ahead.
Ten U.S. hospitals and healthcare systems have partnered with the Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare to end potentially deadly breakdowns in communication that occur during the hand-off of patients from one caregiver to another. Among their recommendations: Identify new and existing technologies to 'hardwire' into the system.
Aided by its electronic health record system, Kaiser Permanente of Georgia has the highest breast cancer-screening rate for eligible women ages 42 to 69 among the health plans reporting to the National Committee on Quality Assurance (NCQA).
Last week, I met with Patientsafe Solutions, a San Diego-based startup founded by serial entrepreneur James Sweeney. Their idea is simple - leverage the iPod Touch 4G form factor and the iOS 4 SDK to create an all in one mobile device for healthcare.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will pay Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide to build a marketing campaign around comparative effectiveness research.
Patients at five-star rated hospitals had a 72 percent lower risk of dying when compared with patients at one-star-rated hospitals, according to a new independent study by healthcare ratings organization HealthGrades.
Michigan hospitals reduced surgical complications by nearly 10 percent at a time when the rest of the nation saw no change in complication rates, according to a new study in the Archives of Surgery. The study showed that sharing ideas and data, and using technology to evaluate the data, proved effective.
CACI International Inc., an Arlington, Va.-based provider of IT solutions, has won a 10-year contract to support the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Information Technology Infrastructure work under the overall CDC Information Management Services (CIMS) contract.
Electronic health records increase physician likelihood of reporting adverse drug events to the FDA, according to a new study by researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH).