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The 1,000-page final outpatient prospective payment system (OPPS) rule, which takes effect this month, provides the congressionally mandated inflationary update and increases overall spending, but still pays hospitals only 83 cents for every dollar spent on outpatient care, the Chicago-based American Hospital Association (AHA) points out.
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Twenty million ambulatory care patient records will be connected as part of an early warning system for terrorism-related illness outbreaks.
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Every year, Hospital Case Managements reader survey asks case managers what they like most and least about the newsletter. And every year, readers variously compliment and criticize us for the extent to which we cover clinical pathways.
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One of the major challenges facing case managers is what to consider when selecting comparative performance data. But that is just the first of several questions that must be addressed, says Patrice Spath, BA, RHIT, a consultant in health care quality with Brown-Spath & Associates in Forest Grove, OR. It also is important to identify and correct serious flaws in utilization and outcome data, she adds.
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Hospitals are running the gamut of possible solutions as they struggle to interpret the provisions of the the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy rule, says Tony Mogavero, director of physician services for St. Petersburg, FL-based John Putnam International, a company that provides web-based and teacher-led education for access personnel.
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With the recent spate of Wall Street scandals, perhaps its not all that surprising that the Baldrige National Quality Programs 2003 Criteria for Performance Excellence will include new questions to reinforce the focus on corporate ethics.
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The bioterrorism training program at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, among the first of its kind in the nation, has been described as a model by the Washington, DC-based Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) during its recent annual meeting.
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Until this year, no health care organization has captured the coveted Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), the top honor a U.S. company can receive for quality management and quality achievement.
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As part of St. Louis-based SSM Health Cares (SSMHC) Clinical Collaborative process, physicians work with other caregivers, administrators, and staff to make rapid improvements in clinical outcomes.
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This is the third in a three-part series on the Catholic Health Association of the United States (CHA) performance improvement program, Living Our Promises, Acting on Faith. The previous article described how the baseline data derived from a comparative date process informed the selection of a specific area targeted for performance improvement. In this final installment, we see how CHA empowered its members to benchmark successful practices implemented at other member facilities and systems.
