The crew from Lehigh Valley presented their experience creating a telemedicine system called aICU (advanced ICU). John Sokalsky lead off, describing how their aICU concept leverages intensivists and critical care nurses in a remote location to serve more ICU patients. The system improves outcomes and reduces costs - always good things. This system integrated their […]
According to this story in the New York Times, “More than half the doctors from New York State, New Jersey and
Connecticut who responded to a survey conducted in April by the
American College of Emergency Physicians said that boarding had
increased significantly in recent years.” Boarding is the practice of treating patients in hallways of busy Emergency […]
The Syracuse Post-Standard profiles a Premise Corporation installation at St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center. The story has a nice lead in that set's the stage for Premise's patient flow application:
Monitoring the flow of patients and bed availability in a
busy 431-bed hospital like St. Joseph's Hospital Health
Center, in Syracuse, is akin to managing flight traffic at
an […]
Tony Chen at the Hospital Impact blog has a great post on the tsunami of recent deals in health care. These deals are changing the health care industry. Outsiders in the form of private equity investors and insider hospital M&A are gobbling up failing organizations or those weakened by market changes for which they have […]
The California Healthcare Foundation has underwritten a study looking at ambulance diversions across the state. Findings in this phase 1 report showed that state wide emergency departments (EDs) were on divert an average of 10% in 2005. Emergency department closings to ambulances continue to confound hospital administrators. You can read about a recent survey showing […]
When attending these shows I feel compelled to try to decipher the “buzz,” to name the hot issues or key trends that characterize the event. This show has gotten so large and so diverse that, like the elephant and the blind men, buzz is perceived through your own perspective and interests. So, HIMSS this year […]
This conference was a great investment of time. (I would include a link to the event so you could see who presented and the topics, but WRG has taken down the link and does not seem to list any past events.) Without exception, the speakers were knowledgeable and informative, conveying lots of good details and […]
Joe Zebrowitz MD, started the day talking about medical necessity and observation status. A big challenge to observation is the different rules for Medicare, Medicaid, and managed care - keeping all these straight is problematic. He presented that the typical attending physician doesn't really know what “observation status” really means. They care about how observation […]
After lunch, Trevor Lewis, MD, kicked things off with a presentation called, Engineering the Observation Unit. As you might expect from the title, he provided an overview for to create and manage observation units. Starting with unit goals and building support for an obs unit, Lewis detailed many of the issues revolving around staffing these […]
Next up, a panel discussion on educating physicians to ensure compliance. The panel is all physicians. One of the first questions had to do with physician staffing of the ED and obs unit (from the perspective of the physician group that provides ED and obs coverage for the hospital). A pitfall of ED based observation […]
