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 […]
Another emergency medical service is deploying wireless technology to support workflow automation, improve pre-hospital care, and better communicate patient data to waiting hospital Emergency Departments. From Information Week (press release):
In an announcement Tuesday, the RAA said the In Motion technology,
which can access different wireless networks while ambulances race to
their destinations, had not only improved pre-hospital […]
Philips does it again, with an announcement that is sure to cause consternation among their competitors (press release). Philips has launched a wireless version of their HeartStart MRx monitor/defibrillator. The device will run on 802.11a/g wireless LANs, “with [the] capability to network with the Philips IntelliVue Clinical Network.” The press release starts off talking about […]
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 […]
Well, I made it to Las Vegas. My workshop, which focuses on how observation units fit into hospital wide patient flow studies starts in about an hour. Cara Strom has done a great job researching, recruiting and producing the event - and been very patient with me. The following is from the blurb on my […]
Medtronic's Physio-Control division suspended shipments of
external defibrillators and other emergency-response gear indefinitely until quality-control problems at a factory in Redmond are resolved. According to this story in the Seattle Times:
The suspension will address weaknesses in “the overall quality
system” in the Redmond factory that were identified by the Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) and the company, Medtronic […]
