The most recent Medpac Report To Congress came out this month. They reported hospital Medicare performance (both financial and quality) and proposed reimbursement changes for 2006 (you know, the recommendations the AHA's been so exercised about).
The report identifies key strategies hospital use to cope with tight Medicare reimbursement. They are: reducing LOS, reduced staffing […]
Siemens showed a communicator “badge” at CeBIT that recognizes voice commands and can be used to place or receive phone calls and potentially control other devices (picture here). Like Vocera, this hands free communications device uses an extensive voice recognition vocabulary to execute various commands via a combined system of badges and a server. Unlike […]
The following links are used to manage the RSS/XML feeds from my site. If you want to view my posts through an RSS news reader (I use Feed Demon) you can subscribe to my feeds using the orange buttons on the right of this page. You can also search for current web content at Technorati, […]
Last week I caught up with an old friend, Angus Douglas. We worked together many years ago at Corometrics. Now he's leading a new executive level sales team at GE Healthcare. One of the interesting things that came out of our conversation was:
Hospital use models must change to get the benefits of new investments in […]
A study by The Center for Health Design reviewed more than 600 research studies to identify impacts that hospital design can have on patient outcomes. The number one recommendation from this review: get rid of double-occupancy rooms and provide patients with single rooms that can be adjusted to meet their medical needs as they change […]
In case you've missed out, a flurry of articles have come out this week on the efficacy of health care information systems technology. What's the take away? To quote the HIStalk guy, “it isn't what you have, its how you use it.” I would add to that, “its what you chose to bite off too.” […]
Nice little brush-up on data analysis from the Joint Commission. Read the 5 tips here.
Although [JCAHO] standards require organizations to aggregate and analyze data, and then use data to show that improvements have been sustained, many organizations struggle with this step. A good start for organizations to assess their data use is to routinely ask […]
Sister company to StatCom, Surgical Information Systems, announced that VP of Sales, Scott L'Heureux has assumed the position of president. A couple of interesting tidbits in an otherwise typical press release: their annualized growth rate from 1997 to 2004 was 76%, and SIS has 220 hospital customers. Company founder Rick Jackson is shifting focus to concentrate […]
It's not every day that you see an academic health care paper based on the work of a snooty postmodern French philosopher (Michel Foucault). Today is that day.
[The] length of hospital stay and the re-engineering of surgical services are examined, not in terms of numerical representations of hospital use, but as part of social […]
Grand Rounds is a weekly round up of medical weblogs. I submitted an entry over the weekend, and just received notice that it was accepted. You can see my entry, along with many others, here.
