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By conducing real-time concurrent denials management, Jewish Hospital and St. Mary's Healthcare, a not-for-profit health care system in Louisville, KY, keeps its average denials rate below 1%, consistently exceeding the hospital's goal of a denials rate of under 2% for commercial patient days, including Medicare managed care patients.
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Recognizing that chronically ill patients benefit from care management beyond the walls of the hospital or their physician's office, Middlesex Hospital in Middletown, CT, has created The Center for Chronic Care Management, which offers four National Committee for Quality Assurance- (NCQA) accredited disease management programs to help patients manage their conditions.
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Childbirth at Evergreen Hospital Medical Center in Kirkland, WA, is viewed as a family experience, rather than a medical event.
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A true test of the success of a process improvement initiative is whether the results can be sustained, and the ED at Hudson Valley Hospital Center in Cortlandt Manor, NY, has just celebrated the fifth anniversary of its "no wait" process. Most patients skip the waiting room entirely and go right to registration, and then to triage.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines to prevent infection with carbapenem-resistant pathogens include the following recommendations.
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Robert Rapp, PharmD, professor of pharmacy at the University of Kentucky Chandler Medical Center, is an outspoken advocate for antibiotic stewardship to preserve the efficacy of our remaining antibiotics against rising drug resistance.
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The continuing global emergence of multidrug resistant gram negative pathogens bugs that are virtually impervious to all antibiotics and can transfer resistance mechanisms between species means infection prevention is more critical than ever during every patient encounter.
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Threatening to spread to North America after originating in hospitals in India, the pan-resistant New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1) enzyme has been linked to a fatal infection in Canada.
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In a lingering legacy of the H1N1 pandemic, stronger protections are now advised for seasonal influenza than was the case prior to the emergence of the novel H1N1 strain. That distinctive status was recently highlighted in new influenza guidance in California.
