Researchers led by the Duke Clinical Research Institute looked at whether paying hospitals extra for following specific treatment guidelines
would improve patient outcomes, and you know, reduce costs. “They found no evidence that financial incentives were associated with
improved outcomes, nor that hospitals had shifted their focus from
other areas in order to concentrate on the areas being […]
Associate Geoff Teed of P3 pointed me to this patient safety assessment survey the other day. Very interesting.
Two recent stories in Modern Healthcare highlight the continued pressure providers face on patient safety and outcomes. The Hospital Quality Alliance will be publishing hospital mortality rates later this month on this Health & Human Services web site. From the story:
In March 1986, the Health Care Financing Administration, as the CMS was
then known, first released […]
Israeli company Life Wave appears to be gaining momentum in the market with their medical device for treating bed sores (pictured right). According to Globes online, the company has signed two new European distributors. Bed sores are one of the 13 preventable hospital-acquired conditions that for which CMS will stop paying hospitals to treat in […]
At the AACN/NTI, Welch Allyn launched the alarm notification system that was shown for the first time at HIMSS in New Orleans. Alarm notification has been a persistent patient safety issue of such magnitude that the Joint Commission added it to their National Patient Safety Goals in 2003 and 2004.
Conventional alarm notification can be […]
Earlier this month the World Health Organization (WHO) released a list of 9 patient safety areas that can impact patient safety. (WHO calls these 9 items “solutions” but they're really not solutions until you actually implement them and apply QI (quality improvement) methods to them.) The items on the list are one's we've seen before […]
Vince Kuraitus responds to my previous post, “Impact of Remote Monitoring Still Inconclusive,” and provides an impassioned case to move ahead with the deployment of RPM (remote patient monitoring).
Actually, his position is very similar to the physician's presenting at last week's conference on Rapid Response Systems (RRS) in Pittsburgh. Both RPM and RRS are […]
Reader Bernard Farrell (who's got a terrific diabetes oriented blog) ask about my recent slam on USB connectivity for medical devices.
I'm intrigued by your comment “The good news is that USB connectivity is pretty
crude and poorly suited for most medical device connectivity applications and
should be eclipsed by Ethernet and wireless LANs.” Given how successful USB […]
The feds prepare the next phase in their transformation of the health care industry with the release of proposed new Prospective Payment System (PPS) rules published May 4th in the Federal Register (I found the proposed rule using the Justia search engine mentioned yesterday). The Home Care Automation Report reports:
CMS has done no more or […]
There is a big gap world wide in hospitals between the care delivered in critical care areas and the care delivered in general patient care areas. Critical care units have all the latest toys like $38,000 patient monitors, 1:1 or 1:2 nurse to patient ratios, they deliver the most sophisticated drug therapies and can perform […]
